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Pilgrim Monument 



Old Pilgrim Days 



By 
LILLIAN HOAG MONK, B. L. 



This is the place: 

Let me review the scene 
And summon from the shadowy Past 

The forms that once have been. 



Longfellow. 



The story which links Scrooby to Plymouth Rock is the 
first great epic of the American people. Long may it be 
recited in their homes and inspire their hearts! 



Dr. John Brown, Bedford, England. 



H. A. MILLER CO. 

LOS ANGELES 

1920 






COPYRIGHT. 1920 

BY 

LILLIAN HOAG MONK 

LOS ANGELES 

CALIFORNIA 






ff 



AUG 31 1920 
iC(.A576:^31 



^\ 



' I 






To My Mother 

A Daughter of the Mayflower and the Arbella 

and 

To My Father 

In whom the Blood of the Quaker and Puritan 

Commingled 

This Little Book 

Is Dedicated 

In Loving Memory. 



CONTENTS 



PART FIRST 

Page 

Elder Brewster and His Time 13 

Our Pilgrim Mothers 64 

Puritanism and Its Work in America 75 

' ' Shakespeare and the Foundations op Liberty 

in America/' A Review op 89 

The Pilgrim Quality 115 

An Old Colony Pilgrimage 125 

The Spell of New England 133 

In the Tracks of Our Forefathers 139 

Our Pilgrim Inheritance 145 

PART SECOND 

The Message of Elder Brewster 153 

The Prophecy of Elder Brewster 157 

Brewster Tablets 161-162 

Elder Brewster and Governor Bradford 165 

Provincetown Memorial Tablet 173 

The Coming of the Mayflower 177-184 

The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers 185 

Selections from Amelia E. Barr, Mrs. Stowe, Edward 

Everett, Dr. John Brown, Frank M. Gregg and 

Mrs. Hemans. 

Appendix 187-188 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

The Pilgrim Monument, Plymouth, Mas- 
sachusetts Frontispiece 

By permission of A. S. Burbank. 

Pilgrim Exiles ^^ 

Pilgrim Lovers ^^ 

The Return of the Mayflower 160 

This picture is copyrighted by Mr. Frank O. Small and is repro- 
duced here by permission of Brown University, the owners of the 
picture. 

Plymouth Beach in 1620 1'76 



They came — a life devoting band — 

In winter o'er the sea; 
Fearless they left their fatherland, 

Home of their infancy. 
And when they battled to be free, 

'Twas not for us and ours alone: 
Millions may trace their destiny 

To the wild beach they trod upon. 

The brave on Bunker's Hill who stood. 

And fearless fought and died, 
Felt in their veins the pilgrims' blood. 

Their spirit and their pride. 
That day's last sunbeam was their last. 

That well-fought field their death-bed scene ; 
But 'twas that battle's bugle blast 

That bade the march of mind begin. 

It sounded o'er the Atlantic waves; 

"One struggle more, and then 
Hearts that arei now to tyrants slaves 

May beat like hearts of men. 
The Pilgrims' names may then be heard 

In other tongues a battle word — 
The gathering war-cry of the free. 

And other nations, from their sleep 
Of bondage waking, long may keep, 

Like us, the Pilgrims' Jubilee." 

Fitz-Oreene Halleck. 



PART FIRST 
ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 

And thus he bore without abuse, 
The grand old name of gentleman. 

Tennyson. 

"W^illiam Brewster of Scrooby. Gentleman." 

Dec. 7, 1607. Records of Ecclesiastical Court of York. 

If there is anything of dignity and meaning in human 
life, it lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to principles; it is 
readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all in their defense. 

Robert Herrick. 

At this momentous period in the world's history, 
it is peculiarly* fitting that the sons and daughters of 
America should commemorate the heroic character and 
purposes of their forefathers, for by such high example 
each succeeding generation is uplifted and inspired. 
The prophetic words of Daniel "Webster and of William 
CuUen Bryant have been fulfilled, and on the shores 
of the Pacific the children of the Pilgrim sires observe 
Forefathers' Day and Compact Day with love and 
reverence, as in the old home. When the Mayflower 
sailed on its lone way across the Atlantic it was at 
once ' ' the fruit of the past and the seed of the future ' '. 
In that germ lay all that America has since become, 



14 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

even as the oak lies enfolded within the acorn. Look- 
ing backward across three centuries to the origin of 
this latter-day glory and greatness, we may well ex- 
claim, What has God wrought ! 

No nation ever had nobler beginnings than our 
own. In high moral and spiritual achievement the 
Pilgrim and Puritan fathers stand pre-eminent among 
the founders of colonies in the annals of civilization. 
It is the glory of New England that her founders 
were not gold hunters nor soldiers of fortune, but 
men of vision, who esteemed spiritual and intellectual 
treasure above any other riches whatsoever. The 
Pilgrim leaders were men of the same high quality as 
those of the Massachusetts Colony. Earnestness, 
gravity, dignity of bearing, high purpose and fine 
intelligence fit a man for "the best" in any state of 
life to which it may please God to call him. The 
leaders of early New England were above all scholars 
and thinkers, and were eminently qualified for the 
choicest society of their own or any other day. The 
men of the Mayflower were the liberals and pro- 
gressives of their time, with a passion for realizing 
their ideals. 

Our scholarly forefathers, familiar with whatever 
was best in the social and intellectual life of the 
Elizabethan age, were in striking contrast to the 
modern immigrant with whom some writers are fond 
of comparing them. The famous Mayflower and 
Arbella, the Lion and the Griffin, were probably not 
much better adapted to ocean travel than the boats 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 15 

which ply along our coasts; but, such as they were, 
our ancestors were first cabin passengers, and in no 
wise to be confounded with the unlettered, unpolished 
alien who lands from the steerage at Ellis Island. 
They were men of ripe scholarship who carried the 
world in their hearts, not alone the Europe of their 
day, but the classic world of Greece and Rome, whose 
great writers held a place in their mental furnishing 
and equipment which could scarcely be paralleled 
today. Unlike the modern immigrant, the leaders of 
early New England seldom fled from intolerable ma- 
terial conditions. Had they chosen to conform in 
religious matters, men like Brewster and "Winslow 
and Winthrop might have lived out their days in honor 
and affluence. Coming for an ideal benefit to this 
outside of the world, a life-long battle with adversity 
was henceforth their portion under the sun. 

Chief among the heroic men and women who with 
rare courage and dignity laid the corner-stone of 
American greatness, was Elder William Brewster, the 
Nestor of their pilgrimage. 

Emerson somewhere says of Sir Philip Sidney and 
Sir Walter Raleigh that they were men of great figure 
and of few deeds. There was something finer in them 
than anything which they said. That something was 
character, which outruns intellectual achievement and 
leaves an impression of intrinsic greatness and power 
out of all proportion to their actual performance on 
the stage of human affairs. The same might be said 
of wise-hearted, high-souled Elder Brewster, whose 



16 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

name has been for generations a household word. In 
fine and lasting colors Governor Bradford has limned 
his portrait for posterity. A few personal anecdotes, 
a few spoken or written words of pith and moment 
have come down to us, yet beyond cavil he holds his 
place as one of the most benign and gracious figures 
in American history. "There is not in all our history 
a more beautiful character," says Edwin D. Mead. 
"No more interesting figure appears in our early 
annals than that of the Elder of Plymouth, the father 
of the Pilgrim Fathers, — no life with more pathetic 
contrasts, none more self-sacrificing, none nobler, 
loftier, holier, or more venerable." After three cen- 
turies, he is now as he was in old Pilgrim days. Elder 
Brewster the Well-beloved. Enthusiasm is vital to 
all truly great achievements, and under all the vicissi- 
tudes of his lot Elder Brewster was sustained by the 
power of a great faith. Beset on every side, like David 
of old he encouraged himself in the Lord his God. 

The son of William and Prudence Brewster, the 
future Elder of Plymouth Colony was born 1560-6, 
probably at Serooby Manor, since his father and 
grandfather had long been prominent factors in the 
management of that estate, which belonged to the 
Archbishop of York, who divided with the Archbishop 
of Canterbury the ecclesiastical authority of England. 
That eminent authority on Pilgrim history, Henry 
Martyn Dexter, says: "It is a necessary inference 
from the few data in our possession that this Brewster 
family was neither socially obscure nor poor. * * * 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 17 

When Brewster was cited before the High Court of 
Commission Dec, 1, 1607, he was described officially 
as William Brewster of Scrowbie 'gen.'; 'Gen' being 
an abbreviation of 'generous,' i.e., well-born." "It 
has been held by some, "writes Mr. Story, "that be- 
cause the coat-of-arms preserved in the Brewster 
family in America is identical with that of the ancient 
Suffolk family of the same name, Elder Brewster must 
have been a descendant of Brewsters of that county. 
The circumstances, however, may be accounted for 
by the supposition that the Brewsters of Scrooby were 
a collateral branch of the Suffolk sept. "^ It is said 
that in one branch of the Suffolk Brewsters the name 
William was kept for more than three hundred years. 

The father, and probably the grandfather, of Elder 
Brewster held the "Postship of Scrobye," a govern- 
ment office of dignity and importance, no private mail 
being carried, but only such as related to the affairs of 
the kingdom. It was a position suited to men of good 
family. In January, 1575-6, Archbishop Grindal ap- 
pointed "his trusty and w^ell-beloved William Brew- 
ster" — the father of Elder Brewster of later days — 
his receiver of Scrooby and all its liberties in Notting- 
hamshire, and also bailiff of the manor-house, to hold 
both offices for life.^ 

Scrooby was not far from Sherwood Forest, and 
William Brewster's boyhood must often have been 
enlivened by tales and traditions of Robin Hood and 

'Alfred T. Story : American Shrines in England. 
^Dr. John Brown: The Pilgrim Fathers in New England. 



18 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

his merry men. The old manor-house, once a stately 
place, had sheltered royalty, and hither after his 
great fall came Cardinal Wolsey, to learn perchance 
' ' the blessedness of being little ' '. The modem traveler 
finds small trace in Scrooby of its former importance, 
but, situated on the Great North Road to Scotland, 
it offered unusual opportunities in Brewster's time 
for contact with the great men and notable events of 
the Elizabethan period. 

Scrooby Manor was a possession of the Archbishops 
of York in the time of William the Conqueror, perhaps 
earlier, and was a place of consequence. The manor- 
house with its thirty-nine chambers and apartments, 
among them a ''dyning chambre ceiled and dressed 
with waynscot," was a stately abode. In 1541 it was 
described by Leland the antiquarian as "a great 
Manor-House of the Bishops standing within a moat, 
and builded in two courts, whereof the first is very 
ample, and all builded of timber, saving the front of 
the hall, this is of brick, to the which one ascends by 
steps of stone." "The old Scrooby church," says 
Charles Carleton Coffin, "rears its tower aloft near 
at hand. Let us take a good look at the manor-house, 
at the spacious kitchen, at the dining hall with its 
massive table, the stag-horns nailed upon its oaken 
beams; for we shall come back to the mansion again 
and again as the years roll by. We shall see gathered 
around the hearthstone men and women who have 
done great things for liberty. "^ The historic place 

iCharles Carleton Coffin: The Story of Liberty. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 19 

fell gradually into decay after Brewster's day. Ex- 
cept that some of the original material may have been 
utilized in its building, the house now standing has 
no relation to the ancient manor-place where Elder 
Brewster lived, and where he welcomed his friends. 
A carved oak beam, probably once a part of the chapel, 
may be seen today at the Congregational House in 
Boston, Massachusetts. 

In 1580 William Brewster matriculated at Peter- 
house, the oldest college of Cambridge University, 
dating backward to the time of the Crusades. Cam- 
bridge, the stronghold of Puritanism and of progres- 
sive ideas in Church and State, furnished a goodly 
number of scholars and thinkers to colonial life in 
America. Three centuries ago bright studious boys 
entered college at an earlier age than at present. Lord 
Bacon began his studies at Cambridge in his thirteenth 
and left it in his sixteenth year. Sir Philip Sidney 
entered Christ Church College at fourteen, and quitted 
Oxford three years later; while John Winthrop, the 
future governor of Massachusetts Colony, like Elder 
Brewster, was sufficiently well-educated at eighteen 
for his entrance into the great world in which both 
were destined to play such noble parts. 

Latin as a spoken and a written language was the 
common medium of communication between learned 
men in the sixteenth century, and William Brewster 
attained to no small proficiency in the same. An apt 
scholar, he took learning "fast as 'twas minister 'd," 
and the atmosphere of Cambridge must have been 



20 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

singularly congenial to his high-toned temperament. 
Here, too, he came under spiritual influences which 
powerfully affected his after life, Bradford tells us 
that it was at Cambridge the young scholar was "first 
seasoned with the seeds of grace and virtue," and the 
bias given which was to persist through a long life- 
time. Thus was the foundation of character laid, and 
received further development from his close associa- 
tion with Mr. William Davison, who held an honored 
place in the service of Queen Elizabeth. 

It is probable that Brewster entered the service of 
Davison when the latter held the important office of 
Clerk of the Privy Council to Elizabeth, an office 
filled only by men of tried and trusted statesmanship. 
From the outset Brewster had wonderful opportunities 
to acquire extensive knowledge and experience in the 
most important affairs of the kingdom. 

Accompanied by Brewster, Davison went as am- 
bassador to Holland in 1585, to take possession of the 
Cautionary Towns demanded by the Queen of Eng- 
land as security for aid rendered that brave little 
country in its life-and-death struggle with Spain. The 
keys of Flushing were given to Davison, who com- 
mitted them to Brewster for safe keeping until their 
delivery into the hands of Sir Philip Sidney. It is 
recorded that Brewster slept with them under his 
pillow. Davison M^as a favorite in the Netherlands, 
and his journey through Holland in company with 
the Earl of Leicester was like a triumphal progress. 
Sumptuous fetes and festivities of all kinds awaited 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 21 

the English envoys in every city, and at Leyden a 
magnificent pageant revived the glories of the heroic 
siege of 1571/ The year spent in Holland was in 
itself a liberal education, and must have imbued 
Brewster's mind with new and higher conceptions of 
society and government. 

"He beheld many wonderful sights while abroad, 
but what he learned was even more important for a 
man whom Providence was educating to be one of 
the founders of Massachusetts. The Dutch were then 
in advance of the world in initiating and working out 
many things which we associate with America, because 
we suppose them to have been invented on this side 
of the Atlantic."^ There were to be seen close at 
hand famous men, among them Sir Philip Sidney, 
whose elegant Latin has supplied the motto of that 
great State of Massachusetts, of which Brewster was 
to lay the foundation stone.^ His mission ended, the 
States honored Davison with a gold chain, which he 
committed to Brewster, and commanded him to wear 
it when they arrived in England, as they rode through 
the country, until they came to the Court. 

The office of private secretary to some great Officer 
of State was usually a stepping-stone to political pre- 
ferment. The first Lord Proprietor of Maryland 
began his political career as under secretary to Sir 
Robert Cecil, while William Davison, starting in public 

'Rev. Ashbel Steele : Life of Elder Brewster. 

^William Eliot GrifHs : "Romance of American Colonization." 

'William Eliot Griffis : The Pilgrims in Their Three Homes. 



22 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

life as private secretary to an English Ambassador, 
Sir Henry Killigrew, rose in after years to a high 
position in the court of Elizabeth. Returning from 
Holland, Davison became Secretary of State, choosing 
for his private secretaries "William Brewster and 
George Cranmer, a grand-nephew of the martyred 
archbishop and an intimate friend and schoolfellow 
of Sir Edwin Sandys, who in later years rendered 
invaluable assistance to Brewster and Robinson in 
launching the Plymouth Colony. Davison was also 
a member of the Privy Council, a body composed of 
twelve of the great Officers of State, together with an 
indefinite number of lords chosen by the queen, and 
whose duty was, under oath, "to advise the sovereign 
according to their best skill, knowledge, and discre- 
tion, without partiality or corruption, and to observe, 
keep, and do, all that good and true counsellors ought 
to do for the sovereign's honor and the public good". 

In such a school, under such a master, was William 
Brewster to receive the training of his youth. All the 
affiliations of his life were unconsciously moulding him 
for his task as a leader of men. Between Davison and 
Brewster there was a marked similarity of character 
and purpose. Davison was accounted one of the 
noblest men of his time, and it speaks volumes for 
Brewster's worth that the great statesman loved him 
as a son, and "finding him so faithful and discreet, 
trusted him above all others that were about him, and 
only employed him in matters of greatest trust and 
secrecy." There is much in the story of William 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 23 

Brewster to remind one of Joseph, whose fine integrity 
and charm of character had power to win, in that 
far-off morning of the world, the utmost confidence 
of all with whom he had to do. In the dew of his 
youth Brewster was learning, like Joseph, that noth- 
ing is of real moment save the ethical and spiritual 
values of life. 

Educated at Cambridge University, familiar with 
the court of Queen Elizabeth, and in close and affec- 
tionate companionship with Davison, there was every- 
thing to make our worshipful Elder Brewster a re- 
fined and courtly man. In the impressionable season 
of youth he had abundant opportunity to observe the 
noblest men of the age, one of whom, Sir Philip Sidney, 
was rightly esteemed the flower of English knighthood. 
Brewster's whole after life indicated that he was not 
unmindful of those fine examples of "high-erected 
thoughts seated in the heart of courtesy". Every- 
thing betokened for the young courtier a brilliant 
future, but the Divinity that shapes our ends had 
other plans and purposes. That finely touched spirit 
was reserved to nobler uses than basking in the world's 
sunshine as a favorite of fortune. 

"It seems strange to connect events apparently so 
wide apart," says a noted English writer, "yet it is 
almost certain that but for the execution of Mary, 
Queen of Scots, there would have been no Pilgrim 
Church at Scrooby or at Leyden, no voyage of the 
Mayflower, and no Elder Brewster in Plymouth 
Church, with all his far-reaching influence in Amer- 



24 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

ican life. ' '^ The execution of Mary Stuart demanded 
a scapegoat, and the perfidy of Elizabeth brought 
Davison's fortunes down with a crash. His spotless 
integrity availed him nothing. He was thrown into 
the Tower of London, from which he emerged broken 
in health and fortune. Brewster was one of those 
rare friends who are born for adversity. To him, as 
to our own Emerson, friendship was not alone for 
serene days and summer skies, but for all the hard 
places of life and death. He remained for some time 
with his unfortunate patron, ' ' doing him many faith- 
ful offices in the time of his trouble". Great even in 
ruin, Davison still had power to secure for his young 
favorite the office of Post of Scrooby, a government 
position of high responsibility, with a residence in the 
manor-house of the Archbishops, and carrying with 
it a salary equal to that of a principal secretary of 
state. This office Avas left vacant in 1590 by the death 
of William Brewster, Senior, whose last days were 
soothed and comforted by the presence of his son. 

Knightly spirits like Sidney and Spenser found 
much to repel them in the falsity and hollowness of 
life in courts, and Davison had learned to his sorrow 
how 

"Wretched is that poor man 
That hangs on princes' favors." 

It may not have been all regret when Brew^ster turned 
his back upon the brilliant life of Elizabeth's court, 

'Dr. John Brown : "The Pilgrim Fathers and Their Puritan 
Successors." 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 25 

and returned to the simpler and more wholesome 

atmosphere of rural England. Perhaps with Sir 

Philip Sidney he might have sung 

"Greater is the shepherd's treasure, 
Than this false, fine, courtly pleasure." 

Be that as it may, the young man returned to Scrooby 
with a mind broadened and enriched by his varied 
experiences in the great world. Hither he brought 
his bride, the lady of Scrooby manor, where they spent 
happy years in high esteem among the gentlefolks of 
those parts, themselves among "the Best". 

Had he chosen to do so, Brewster might have 
passed his days in ease and dignity. Very slowly he 
formed the resolve to abandon the Church of England 
in which his childhood and youth had been nurtured. 
As great in act as in thought, when persecution fell 
thick and fast upon men he loved and honored, "William 
Brewster cast in his lot with the people of God, ' ' what- 
soever it should cost him". Under his fostering care 
the little band of non-conformists, whose hearts God 
had touched, grew strong and of such courage and 
moral hardihood that they feared nothing save dis- 
obedience to the Higher Law. In the old palace of 
the archbishops the Spirit of New England had its 
birth. In the wainscoted drawing room of Scrooby 
manor-house the Massachusetts cradle began to rock.'- ^ 

At this period began the famous friendship of 
Brewster and Bradford which was to last unbroken 
for forty years. 

iWllliam Eliot Griffls : Brave Little Holland. 
William Eliot Griffls : Romance of American Colonization. 



26 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

"Soon the eager lad found his way to Brewster. 
Sunday morning he followed the meadow-path to 
Scrooby, and thence accompanied by his friend to 
Babworth and Clifton, As the grave middle-aged 
courtier and the earnest confiding youth paced along 
the fragrant pathway, little did they look like the 
Moses and Aaron who were to establish the ark of 
the covenant in a Canaan yet to be conquered from 
the Trans-Atlantic wilderness. Bradford found in 
Brewster not only religious sympathy, but secular 
instruction; his friend was a born teacher, and was 
rarely qualified to pass beyond the meagre range of 
textbooks and make his pupil familiar with the affairs 
of camps, courts, and countries. The youth who had 
a fondness for history and antiquities, must have found 
no little enjoyment and profit in studying the Scrooby 
palace in its decaying grandeur, especially with the 
expositions of its learned master. ' '^ To know Brewster 
as Bradford knew him was a liberal education to the 
future governor and historian of Plymouth Colony. 

These halcyon days of peace soon ended, and clouds 
heavy and dark gathered about their pathway. Very 
dear to Elder Brewster's heart must have been the 
great manor-place at Scrooby, the home of his child- 
hood and young manhood, to which he had brought 
his bride and where sons and daughters were born to 
him, but having put his hand to the plough he would 
not turn back. The story of the flight to Holland is 
a more than twice-told tale. Suffice it to say, that 

^John A. Goodwin : The Pilgrim Republic. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 27 

themselves in the greatest peril of all, Brewster, Robin- 
son, and Clifton passed over last, having stayed to 
help the weakest over before them. It has been well 
said that the Pilgrim exiles deserved to be called the 
Huguenots of England, and William Brewster was 
their Coligny.^ 

The Pilgrim was a Puritan, but the Puritan was 
not a Pilgrim. The Puritan desired to purify and 
reform abuses within the Church of England, while the 
Pilgrim reverted to the simplicity of the early Chris- 
tian Church. Nothing but the most exalted sense of 
truth and duty could have driven men like Robinson 
and Brewster and Bradford from the faith of their 
fathers. 

John Robinson and William Brewster were the 
founders of American Congregationalism, and eastern 
England is holy ground to Pilgrim and Puritan alike. 
Not far from Scrooby is Epworth, the birthplace of 
John Wesley, who more than a century and a half 
later organized the great Methodist movement, which 
has brought light and healing to thousands of broken 
spirits sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, 
A little farther distant is Bedford, where John Bunyan 
saw visions and dreamed dreams. There be many 
American shrines in England, honored alike in the 
Old World and in the New. 

Coming to Amsterdam, they found the Separatist 
church torn with fierce controversies, and dreading to 

>Rev S. E". Herrick: Some Heretics of Yesterday. 



28 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

become involved in its dissensions, the Scrooby church 
voluntarily removed to Leyden where they might dwell 
together in unity, "valuing peace and their spiritual 
comfort above every other riches whatsoever." To 
them also the Right was more precious than Peace, 
yet when it could be secured without a sacrifice of 
principle, the Pilgrims regarded peace as the greatest 
of earthly blessings. 

That Elder Brewster cherished a strong regard 
for the Church of England is evinced by a custom he 
retained of hearing the ministers of that communion 
in Holland. A finely tolerant spirit characterized 
both the Elder and the Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, 
for when any man about to join them began to in- 
veigh against the English church, Robinson and Brew- 
ster would stop him, saying they required no such 
thing, but only separation from its evils. 

In those days, when men fled for conscience' sake, 
they left their goods behind them, and Pilgrim losses 
were heavy as they escaped from the land of their 
fathers. Though "in regard to his former breeding 
and course of life not so fit for many employments 
as others were, especially such as were toilsome and 
laborious," we read in Bradford's chronicle with what 
cheerfulness and dignity Elder Brewster bore the un- 
accustomed hardships and deprivations of his lot. 
His scholarship stood him in good stead, and in time 
enabled him to "live well and plentifully," by teach- 
ing English to young men in Leyden University, some 
of them great men 's sons. A priceless treasure would 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 29 

be a copy of the grammar he drew up according to 
Latin rules, by which the study of English was made 
easy. 

It is unlikely that Brewster returned to London 
between 1588-1607, but thirty years after quitting 
Davison he revisited those scenes, on a mission to ar- 
range for the departure of the Pilgrims to the New 
"World. Westminster Hall and the Tower of London, 
Westminster Abbey and Old St, Paul's, with their 
wonderful historic associations, were familiar to Brew- 
ster 's youth, and the London of Shakespeare was part 
and parcel of his strangely checkered life. There is 
a tradition that he paid a visit to Serooby in 1618-19, 
to see and say farewell to those devoted men and 
women who by reason of age and infirmity had not 
shared the exodus to Holland twelve years before. 
"We can imagine," says Alfred Story, "the great- 
hearted Brewster going from one to another, bidding 
them farewell, with words of cheer and encourage- 
ment, and leaving behind him the never-to-be-oblit- 
erated memory of a man of noble stature, habited in 
a coat of purple velvet, green vest, and gray corduroy 
small clothes, but more than all these, wearing ever a 
smile of ineffable sweetness on his grave and hand- 
some face. ' '^ And so the Elder of the Pilgrims bade 
a long farewell to Serooby manor and to the cherished 
scenes and associations of his youth and early man- 
hood, and set forth on that fateful journey to the 
wild New World, where, with his heroic friends and 

'Alfred T. Story : American Shrines in England. 



30 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

co-workers, he was to lay the foundations of a new 
tabernacle in the wilderness. 

A wealthy friend of the Pilgrims furnished the 
means to set up a printing press in Leyden, and 
Brewster, assuming the duties of an editor, had in- 
curred the enmity of royal and ecclesiastical digni- 
taries in England by publishing religious books for- 
bidden in his native land. At the time he was in 
London preparing for the departure to the New World, 
a warrant was out for his arrest for publishing sedi- 
tious books in Holland. To the High Commission 
Court a free press was as dangerous as dynamite, 
and Brewster with his little stone of Truth was smit- 
ing the giant tyranny and superstition of ages. "For 
more than a year before he left Delfshaven in the 
Speedwell," says Arber, "the Ruling Elder of the 
Pilgrim Church was a hunted man; and it speaks 
volumes for the fidelity of the church that, through 
all this storm, they so bravely and faithfully sheltered 
their beloved Officer from the fury of the English 
King." 

It is impossible to overestimate the benefits which 
accrued to the Pilgrims from their twelve years' resi- 
dence in Holland. The enlightened and liberal views 
upon civil government and religious toleration ; the 
zeal for universal education and the incentives to 
knowledge in a land where, three hundred years ago, 
books were ' ' as common as bread and cheese ' ' ; the 
custom of equal though different education of boys 
and girls; the exquisite cleanliness of Dutch houses 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 31 

and towns, to be reflected later in the time-honored 
neatness and thrift of New England; the charm and 
tastefulness of domestic life in Holland, must have 
exercised a powerful influence upon the ideals and 
habits of our forebears. 

But with that tenacity of race inherent in the 
Anglo-Saxon breed the Pilgrims were unwilling to 
lose their identity as Englishmen. The men of the 
Mayflower and the Arbella were of the same good 
stock and breeding as Shakespeare and Drake and 
Raleigh, and their love for England was deep and 
abiding. Living as exiles in a strange land, the 
hearts of the Pilgrims turned fondly backward to the 
place of their nativity. To renounce was not to forget, 
and memories of the old home, of childhood, of old 
churches and churchyards where precious dust was 
garnered, must have filled every heart. One great 
motive for their emigration to America, Winslow tells 
us, was because it was grievous unto them to live from 
under the protection of the State of England, and 
their fear of losing their language and the name of 
English. Added to this was the difficulty of giving 
their children such an education as they had them- 
selves received. It was impossible to return to the 
homeland, so ' ' lifting up their hearts with their hands 
unto God in the heavens," they resolved to go forth 
in the strength of Him who is invisible to found an- 
other and a better England beyond the Atlantic. 

Old age was creeping on apace, but ''first in all 
adventures and forwardest in any," the heroic Elder 



32 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

stood girt and road-ready to lead the way to a land 
beyond the seas. No perils on ocean or on land could 
daunt his martyr spirit, which animated his whole 
flock, and enabled them to triumph over danger and 
difficulty, and even death itself. Called from on high, 
the Pilgrim Fathers fared forth to their Great Adven- 
ture, in answer to a summons as divine as that which 
led Abraham from his country and his father's house, 
and fraught with consequences as momentous to the 
human race. Nor did they go alone. They were 
accompanied in their perilous undertaking by the 
Pilgrim Mothers, those "native and heroical spirits" 
who shared to the uttermost the high courage and con- 
stancy which have been the immemorial inheritance of 
the English race in every land and under every sky. 

In launching the Mayflower enterprise, Brewster 
and Robinson found a friend and helper in Sir Edwin 
Sandys, one of the greatest men of a great age, with 
whose family the Brewsters of Scrooby had long been 
associated. All the affiliations of Elder Brewster's 
eventful life had tended to promote in him liberal 
ideas in politics and religion. His residence in Hol- 
land had taught him new lessons in religious tolera- 
tion and civil liberty. From Davison he had imbibed 
strong Puritan convictions, and in that service he had 
enjoyed familiar acquaintance with George Cranmer 
and Sir Edwyn Sandys, both of whom had been 
pupils of the incomparable Hooker, a man of such 
enlightened views that the world has yet scarcely 
attained to the largeness of his thought. In that most 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 33 

interesting book, "Shakespeare and the Founders of 
Liberty in America," Charles Mills Gayley says: 
' ' There can be no doubt that the qualities displayed by 
William Brewster, as Elder of the congregation in 
Leyden and afterwards in Plymouth Colony, were 
colored by long association with 'his very loving 
friend', Sir Edwin Sandys, and their intimate from 
yo(uth, George Cranmer, as well as by first-hand 
acquaintance with the printed word of Richard 
Hooker. This kinship with the school of that great 
master is reflected in the genial humanity, the liberal 
knowledge and outlook, the conservative wisdom, with 
which the historic Elder moulded the civil polity of 
the first settlement in New England, and held in check 
tendencies elsewhere manifested toward religious 
bigotry and oppression." From 1585 to 1591 Richard 
Hooker was preaching in the Temple, and as William 
Brewster remained in London until 1587-8, it is 
extremely probable that he and George Cranmer drank 
deeply of the wisdom of this great teacher and phil- 
osopher, — the choice and master spirit of that age. 
Elder Brewster was a man of great experiences, and 
was eminently qualified to become when time was ripe 
a founder of New England, and one of the most ven- 
erated figures of American history.^ 

The great enterprise was not entered into rashly 
and unadvisedly, for well those men of light and 
leading knew how hard it would be for those ' ' broughte 
upp among bookes and learned men, to live in a bar- 

•James Kendall Hosmer. Wlnthrop's Journal, Vol. 1, P. 93. 



34 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

barous place, wherein is no learning and less syvil- 
lytie." But something higher than themselves was 
beckoning them on, and in the beautiful words of 
Brewster and Robinson, "It was not with them as 
with other men, whom small things could discourage, 
or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at 
home again." They considered that "all great and 
honorable actions were accompanied with great diffi- ^ 
culties, which must be both enterprised and overcome 
with answerable courages." So they left Leyden, 
"that goodly and pleasant city which had been their 
resting-place near twelve years. But they knew they 
were Pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, 
but lifted up their eyes to heaven, their dearest coun- 
try, and quieted their spirits. ' ' The spectators of that 
sad and mournful parting at Delfshaven, July 22, 
1620, little dreamed that they were witnessing an 
event of supreme importance in the annals of mankind. 

The story of the Pilgrim's life in the New World 
may be read in Bradford's History of Plymouth Plan- 
tation, the original of which is preserved under glass 
in the State Library at Boston, Massachusetts. Thou- 
sands are strangely stirred at sight of that yellow, 
time-stained volume, with its moving record of the 
day of small things and of immense difficulties met 
and overcome with ' ' answerable courages. ' ' The quiet 
heroism' of its annals stirs one's pulses like Kipling's 
' ' Recessional. ' ' The world has wandered far in theo- 
logical ways since the days of the fathers, but devout 
free thought is the logical outgrowth of the spiritual 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 3'5 

legacy left us by those progressive men of forward- 
looking minds, who believed with all their hearts that 
new light and new truth were yet to break from God's 
Holy Word. The little candle lighted so long ago haa 
thrown its beams across the whole earth, and vitally 
affected the fortunes of the human race. 

New England was pre-eminently the colony of con- 
science. No body of men ever appreciated better the 
spiritual values of life. Shorn of these, existence was 
to them a mockery, and man but gilded loam or painted 
clay. Most fortunate is America in having her founda- 
tions laid by men who never doubted that God is, and 
that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. 
To them religion was "a great heaven-high Unques- 
tionability, encompassing and interpenetrating the 
Avhole of life." 

In crucial moments there was something peculiarly 
high and noble in the Pilgrim temper. Anchoring on 
Cape Cod Bay at the approach of winter, there was 
neither time nor strength for extensive explorations of 
a dangerous coast. Later voyages disclosed the greater 
fertility and promise of the Massachusetts country, but 
the Pilgrims consoled themselves in noble fashion when 
they "mett with many sadd and discomfortable 
things. " " And although, ' ' wrote one of their friends, 
"it seemeth you have discovered many more rivers 
and fertill grounds than that where you are, yet 
seeing by God's providence that place fell to your 
lote, let it be accounted as your portion; and rather 
fix your eyes upon that which may be done ther, than 



36 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

languish in hope after things els-where. If your place 
be not the best, it is better, you shall be less envied and 
encroached upon ; and such as are earthly minded will 
not settle too near your border. If the land afford you 
bread, and the sea yield you fish, rest you awhile con- 
tented, God will one day afford you better fare. And 
all men shall know you are neither fugetives nor dis- 
contents. But can, if God so order it, take the worst 
to yourselves with content, and leave the best to your 
neighbors with cheerfulness." When death had 
reduced the little colony almost to the vanishing point, 
their faithful friends wrote : "In a battle it is not 
looked for but that divers shall die. * * * Let it 
not be grievous unto you that you have been instru- 
ments to break the ice for others who shall come after 
with less difficulty. The honor shall be yours to the 
world's end." In this high New England fashion did 
our fathers endure and overcome the slings and arrows 
of outrageous fortune. 

Threatened with famine, God spread for His chil- 
dren a table in the wilderness. Elder Brewster, who 
had once feasted in ambassador's palaces, sitting down 
to a dinner of clams and a cup of fair spring water, 
still offered up thanks to God who had given them ' ' to 
suck of the abundance of the seas, and of treasure hid 
in the sand." Under life's stern discipline he had 
gone from strength to strength, and the grand spirit of 
the man only shone more brightly against the dark 
background of adversity. "A high aim is curative as 
arnica," and a noble ideal of life and its duties lifts 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 37 

the daily round, the common task, into the region of 
the heroic. More than once the conditions were such 
as to wholly discourage and sink them, but "they bore 
their wants with cheerfulness and rested on provi- 
dence." Wise men were the pilots of Plymouth Col- 
ony, and under their skillful guidance ultimate inde- 
pendence and prosperity were assured. No more shin- 
ing examples of faith, courage and constancy are to be 
found in the history of civilization, 

' At the lowest ebb of their fortunes the Merchant 
Adventurers of London wrote the Pilgrims : ' ' We are 
persuaded you are the people that must make a plan- 
tation and erect a city in those remote places, when all 
others fail and return," a confidence which was fully 
justified. The rise and progress of Plymouth Colony 
was watched with keen interest by Puritan England, 
and the economic success of a handful of dauntless 
men wrung from the hardest and most adverse condi- 
tions on that bleak Northern coast, encouraged the 
founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ten years 
later. "I am not rescuing from oblivion," writes 
Governor Hutchinson, ''the names of heroes whose 
chief merit is the overthrow of cities, provinces, and 
empires, but the names of the founders of a flourishing 
town and colony, if not of the whole British empire in 
America. The settlement of this colony occasioned 
the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, which was the 
source of all other Colonies of New England. Virginia 
was in a dying state^ and semed to revive and flourish 
from the example of New England." 



38 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

As one small candle may light a thousand, writes 
Governor Bradford, so the light here kindled hath 
shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation. 

The economic success of Plymouth Colony was the 
direct cause of the further immigation of Englishmen 
dissatisfied with conditions in the homeland, where the 
prospects for political and religious liberty grew 
darker and darker under the misrule of the Stuart 
kings. ' ' Had the Pilgrims not come, and had they not 
succeeded," says Roland G. Usher, "the energy of 
the great emigration to :Massachusetts would have 
expended itself elsewhere and the history of the world 
might perhaps have been different. 

Elder Brewster would naturally have been chosen 
the first governor of Plymouth Colony, but for the 
fact that in his day the ecclesiastical position was supe- 
rior to the civil, and these offices were never combined 
in one person, which was the bar to his being governor.^ 
This fact not being understood has sometimes given 
rise to misconceptions as to the real pre-eminence of 
Brewster in Plymouth Plantation. He was second to 
none, and had no superiors in the affairs of that little 
commonwealth. To the end of his days he was the 
governor's chief counsellor in every affair of moment. 

iHutchinson. History of Massachusetts, Vol. 2. 
Felt's Ecclesiastical History. 

"Brewster was the life and stay of the plantation; but he 
being its ruling elder, William Bradford, its historian, was chosen 
Carver's successor." Bancroft : History United States. "From the 
first Brewster was the soul of Plymouth Colony." William Eliot 
Griffis : The Pilgrims in Their Three Homes. "Brewster was the 
very soul of the colony " Justin Winsor : History of Duxbury. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 39 

At seventy-five he was a principal member of the 
special committee which drew up a code of laws for 
the Colony. For this task he was peculiarly fitted by 
his early training, which had acquainted him with the 
framing of state papers as well as with the principles 
of true statesmanship and diplomacy. 

"1 serve," might have been the truly royal motto 
of these Pilgrim leaders, who, without compensation 
for their labors, wrought unceasingly for the upbuild- 
ing of that little community in a transatlantic wilder- 
ness. The noblest motive is the public good, says 
Virgil, and these early lawgivers and magistrates 
sought no separate and selfish benefit. "A man must 
not expect only to live and doe good to himself, ' ' wrote 
the Pilgrims, "but he should see where he can live to 
do most good to others. ' ' A generous public spirit has 
been an essential element of New England character 
since the days of Brewster and Bradford and Cushman 
and Winthrop, who enunciated the great principle of 
"each for all and all for each," and with one accord 
deprecated "all retiredness of mind from the common 
good" as fatal to the higher interests of any com- 
munity. 

The compact signed in the cabin of the Mayflower 
almost three hundred years ago provided for just and 
equal laws and the consent of the governed. Later, a 
way was devised to secure practically the initiative, 
the referendum and the recall. Any law passed by 
the General Court could be repealed by the freemen of 
Plymouth Colony in thir Court of Election. These 



40 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

bulwarks of freedom were well kno^^ii to our sagacious 
forefathers/ 

The Pilgrim Fathers were not originally socialistic 
or communistic in principle or purpose. Their migra- 
tion to the new world was financed by the Merchant 
Adventurers of London, and through force of circum- 
stances they were compelled to have their work and 
goods in common for a season. At the end of the first 
year they had demonstrated the futility of such an 
arrangement, and henceforth the burdens and heavy 
indebtedness of Plymouth Colony were borne success- 
fully by men laboring as individuals, yet united for 
the common good. Until the Brook Farm experiment, 
two centuries later, perhaps socialistic theories have 
never been so thoroughly tested by men and women 
equally high-minded and conscientious. In both cases 
the conclusions arrived at were essentially the same. 

The foundations of the Pilgrim Republic were laid 
in law and order, in liberty but not in license. Their 
freedom was not the freedom of evil-doers. Few men 
have better apprehended the perfect law of librty. 
From the landing of the Pilgrims to the American 
Revolution, morals were based upon the doctrine of 
disinterested benevolence, and the duty of every man 
to sacrifice himself for the glory of God, the freedom 
of his country, and the well-being of the race. Liberty 
acquired by the sacrifice and sufferings of a revered 
ancestry was guarded under the blessing of God, as a 
sacred trust for posterity.^ Fed on such meat, it is no 

^Frederick A. Noble : The Pilgrims, 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 41 

wonder that New England grew so great. Fortunately 
for America that high impress has never faded away. 
Brewster and Bradford, Roger Williams and John 
Winthrop, Hooker and Eliot still stand at the cross- 
ways of American history, indicating with unerring 
finger the pathway of life, and the eternal conse- 
quences which flow from choosing life and good, or 
death and evil. 

Poring over Pilgrim and Puritan annals, one is 
above all impressed with the deep earnestness and 
sincerity of these men. The life of early New England 
was based upon reality. To Be and not Seem was their 
being's end and aim, and that fine sincerity fell like a 
mantle upon their children's; children. The founders 
of Plymouth Colony and of Massachusetts Bay were 
men of ideals engaged in great practical tasks. Grand 
results are achieved not so much by the purely prac- 
tical mind as by the ideal mind trained to practical 
uses. It is the man with the Vision who builds on ever- 
lasting foundations. 

One fine outstanding characteristic of the Pilgrims 
was their sturdy common sense. Few men have 
believed more devoutly in God and in the power of 
prayer, yet they labored unceasingly to bring about the 
desired result. Having done their utmost, they rested 
on Providence. Upon the recovery of Governor Brad- 
ford from a dangerous illness, with prayer and praise 
they recorded that, "by the help of God and the dili- 

>Bancroft: History of the United States, Vol. 4, P. 239. 



42 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

gent use of means," their faithful leader had been 
restored to life and strength. In a darker age than our 
own, whatever science, or wisdom, or knowledge had 
taught the human race, they accepted gladly. Their 
minds were open to new light and new truth from 
whatever source it might be revealed unto them. 
' ' Nothing true in right reason and sound philosophy, ' ' 
said John Robinson, "is, or can be, false in divinity." 
It is this freedom from fanaticism, this harmonious 
balance of mind and character, which have made the 
Pilgrims justly revered as the forefathers of a great 
people. 

From the outset friendly relations existed between 
the Plymouth and Virginia plantations. Returning 
to England in 1622, John Pory, secretary of the Vir- 
ginia Colony and a man of considerable distinction, 
paid a visit to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and cordial 
relations sprang up with Elder Brewster and Governor 
Bradford, men of scholarly tastes like his own. A 
letter written by John Pory expresses his appreciation 
of their kindness: "To your selfe and Mr. Brewster I 
must humbly acknowledge myself many ways indebted, 
whose books I would have you think very well 
bestowed, who esteems them such jewels." Then as 
now a love of letters is a tie that binds, and these 
scholars of the New World were attracted to each other 
as deep calleth unto deep. We further learn that 
Plymouth was indebted to Master John Pory when he 
reached England for "the credit and good that he 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 43 

procured unto the plantation of Plymouth, and that 
amongst those of no mean rank." Other persons of 
distinction occasionally looked in upon the Plymouth 
settlers, and received a friendly welcome unchilled by 
sectarian prejudice. From distant Canada came 
Father Druillettes, a Jesuit missionary, whom that 
Apostolic spirit, John Eliot, besought to spend the 
winter with him in Roxbury, and who was entertained 
at Plymouth with cordial courtesy, Governor Bradford 
providing a fish dinner on Friday for his guest. Cer- 
tainly religious bigotry was not a universal attribute 
of either Puritan or Pilgrim. 

In the conduct of life the Pilgrims set high exam- 
ples of courtesy and gentlehood. Their hospitality to 
friend and foe, and their noble generosity to poverty- 
stricken and oftentimes unworthy persons, would have 
done honor to a Red Cross Knight, 

The Pilgrims were neither bigots nor persecutors. 
They neither intended nor expected to establish 
religious or ecclesiastical uniformity. In 1624 Brad- 
ford states that "they were willing and desirous that 
any honest men may live with them, that will carry 
themselves peaceably and seek the common good. ' ' He 
adds that many who were not members of the 
Plymouth Church will ''not live elsewhere so long as 
they may live with us. "^ In 1645 a majority of the 
House of Delegates favored an act to allow and main- 
tain full and free toleration to all men that would 

'Leonard Bacon : Genesis of the New England Churches, P. 412. 



44 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

preserve the civil peace and submit unto government ; 
and there was no limitation nor exception against 
Turk, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, Nicolaitan, Fami- 
list, or any other, but it was stifled by a few who were 
not yet able to follow the elect souls into untrodden 
pathways of spiritual truth. 

The work of Christianizing the Indians occupied a 
large place in the thoughts of the founders of New 
England. Besides the personal motives for emigrating 
to America, the Pilgrims had the genuine missionary 
spirit. Looking not alone upon their own things, but 
upon the things of others, they cherished "a great hope 
and inward zeal of advancing the kingdom of Christ" 
beyond the Atlantic. Devoted men in the Plymouth 
and Bay Colonies spent their lives in the effort to bring 
the red men of the forest into the glorious liberty of 
the children of God. It was a logical sequence that the 
American Board of Foreign Missions should have had 
its birth in Massachusetts two centuries later, and its 
work is now known to the ends of the earth. 

To the wild shore of New England our fathers 
brought the habits .and tastes of cultivated men born 
and bred in the spacious Elizabethan era. The abun- 
dant life does not consist in the multitude of material 
possessions, and in all that truly dignifies human exist- 
ence our fathers in the wilderness were as wise as we. 
As classical scholars they have no rival in modern 
times. ' ' We are apt to wonder, ' ' writes James Russell 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 45 

Lowell, "at the scholarship of the men of three cen- 
turies ago, and a certain dignity of phrase that char- 
acterized them. They were scholars because they did 
not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, 
but these were of the best. Their speech was noble 
because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with 
Plato." In mind, in character, and in the conduct of 
life, they sought Quality, rather than Quantity, and 
the multiplication of riches. 

To an ever-growing mind like Elder Brewster's, 
books were as indispensable as meat and drink. In his 
precious colonial library Bacon's "Advancement of 
Learning" had a place, and likewise the ' Apoly gye," 
in which the great writer and statesman, fallen from 
his high estate, commended himself to the merciful 
judgment of future generations. Among the priceless 
relics of Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth is an ancient, time- 
worn volume of Seneca's Works, printed in 1614, 
which once belonged to Elder Brewster, and upon 
which one gazes with reverence, thinking what a treas- 
ure it must have been to its scholarly owner. Did his 
heart burn within him as he read that "Even from a 
corner it is possible to spring up into heaven,- rise, 
therefore, and form thyself into a fashion worthy of 
God ; thou canst not do this with silver and gold ; an 
image like unto God cannot be formed out of such 
materials as these." Such thoughts must have been 
like a fountain of life to the Pilgrim scholar in his poor 
cottage in the wilderness. Heading these books is like 
opening a window into the inmost minds of our ances- 



46 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

tors. We realize what courage and high consolation 
must have streamed into their souls from the constant 
perusal of noble books. On that lonely outpost of 
civilization his choice little library of three hundred 
volumes was a godsend to the Elder and his friends. 
The quaint old books, many of them in Latin, look dry 
enough to us, but those volumes were indeed a treasury 
of remedies for the soul. What lover of books but 
sympathizes with the old New England scholars, some 
of whom dreaded to die most of all because they would 
never again enter the room of their books which had 
given them such delight.^ 

Absorbed for generations in the hardest of material 
tasks — the task of subduing a continent — and beset by 
foes without and foes within, none the less New 
England maintained its high standard of education 
and moral exeellencCj developing as its chief asset suc- 
cessive generations of men and women capable of the 
noblest and most disinterested patriotism, and famous, 
as the years rolled by, in history, poetry, philosophy, 
oratory, theology, education, and in every field of 
human endeavor. 

New England, like Old England, has never sep- 
arated intellect from character. From the .beginning 
religion and education walked hand in hand. With all 
their love of learning, Brewster and Bradford would 
have scouted any system of education which developed 
the intellect, leaving the heart and the soul untaught 

'Sydney George Fisher : "Men, Women and Manners in Colonial 
Times," Vol. 1, P. 130. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 47 

and undisciplined. Character plus education was their 
ideal, but above all Character. Knowledge and true 
godliness were to our fathers what the Urim and the 
Thummim were to the priestly sons of Aaron. In light 
and perfection lay the whole meaning of man's destiny 
here below. The monument towering over Plymouth 
is a fitting symbol of the Pilgrims — Faith pointing 
heavenward, and buttressed by Religion, Education, 
Morality, and Freedom. On granite foundations they 
reared their little commonwealth, and the centuries 
have demonstrated the wisdom of their thought. The 
ethics of the fathers have not failed to leave their 
impress upon every generation since the Mayflower 
and the Arbella dropped anchor on the New England 
shore. 

Finding the place too straight for their increasing 
activities, some of the most eminent of the Pilgrims at 
length sought land outside of Plymouth. Captain's 
Hill, at Duxbury, still marks the homestead of Miles 
Standish, and on the high monument the figure of the 
heroic Captain stands like a sentinel keeping watch 
and ward. Not far away dwelt Elder Brewster, his 
land adjoining that of Miles Standish on the lovely 
Duxbury shore. The Miles Standish Hotel and its 
famous spring of water are on Brewster's land. Half 
a mile distant is that sacred spot, ' ' the Nook, ' ' forever 
hallowed as the home of the venerated Elder of the 
Mayflower. His place was known as Eagle's Nest, 
from the ocean eagle making its nest in a tall clump 
of whitewood trees which stood until early in the nine- 



48 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

teenth century near the Nook point on the homestead 
at Duxbury, and were known as the "Brewster trees." 
According to tradition it was here that Elder Brewster 
planted the first apple tree in New England. By the 
time of the Revolution the original trees had disap- 
peared, but another of large size had gro\ATi up from 
its roots, and was called the ' ' Brewster tree. ' '^ 

Life abounds in strange contrasts, and none more 
striking than that which is presented between the rude 
colonial dwelling and the palaces familiar to Elder 
Brewster's youth and early manhood. The inven- 
tories still extant give a fair idea of household furnish- 
ings in the olden time. Those of Elder Brewster and 
Governor Winthrop were of almost identical value 
and represented a reasonable degree of comfort, home- 
like yet simple and primitive, and wholly unlike our 
modern luxurious abodes. Perchance if we could visit 
the earthly habitations of Aristides the Just and 
Phocian, of Cato and Paulus ^Emilius, we should be 
surprised at the simplicity and bareness of their 
dwellings. Is it indeed true that men in pursuit of 
greatness feel no little wants? 

Recognizing the great principles of even-handed 
justice and the equality of all men before the law, the 
founders of New England were yet men of the Eliza- 
bethan era, and held with Shakespeare that 
"Clay and clay differs in dignity, 
Whose dust is both alike." 

Democracy in the modern sense was yet unborn. The 

'Justin Winsor : History of Duxbury. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 49 

founders of New Plymouth and Virginia, and later of 
Massachusetts Bay, like the liberal thinkers and states- 
men of England, held aristo-democratic views of 
society and government. Pilgrim and Puritan leaders 
desired only "the Best" as sharers in their enterprise, 
and early ]\Iassachusetts was a mixture of aristocracy 
and democracy, but their valuations were based upon 
something infinitely higher than silver and gold. Moral 
and spiritual fitness was the supreme test of every 
man, and none might presume to wear an "undeserved 
dignity." 

During the Pilgrims' life in Holland, sorrow and 
want, those stern levelers of all human distinctions, 
fostered the democratic tendencies which were one day 
to germinate in the virgin soil of Nw England. The 
hearts of the Pilgrims were knit together in bonds of 
which they made great conscience, and held them- 
selves ' ' straitly tied to all care of each other, and of the 
whole by every one and so mutually. ' ' A noble democ- 
racy, born in the cabin of the Mayflower, has been New 
England's greatest asset, and in democracy lies the 
h.opp of the world. 

With a sympathy as wide as sorrow. Elder Brew- 
ster retained some of the predilections to which he had 
been bred. "He was tender-hearted and compassion- 
ate to all such as were in misery, but especially of such 
as liad been of good estate and rank, and had fallen 
into want and poverty, either for goodness or 
religion's sake, or by the injury and oppression of 
others. He would say, of all men these deserved to be 



50 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

]nost pitied, and none did more offend and displease 
him, than such as would haughtily and proudly carry 
and lift themselves, being risen from nothing, and 
having little else in them but a few fine clothes or a 
little riches more than others."^ Mere wealth and 
rank had no power to command his homage, and his 
eye was keen to discern intrinsic worth in the hum- 
blest person. Never since the foundation of the world 
has the aristocracy of character met with such instant 
recognition and honor as in early New England. Per- 
sonal integrity, personal character coupled with high 
educational ideals, were keys that unlocked every door. 

In the finest sense of the word a gentleman, both in 
the Old World and in the New, Elder Brewster's was 
an aristocratic mind in that the noblest things were 
native to him. His was a natural affinity for the Best 
of the earth, drawn to it by an attraction as irresistible 
as the law of gravitation. Knowledge and wisdom and 
true godliness dwelt at his hearthstone as his familiar 
friends. In all the crises of life and death he took 
counsel with the noblest that had been known or done 
in the world. In storm and sunshine, in king's pal- 
aces or leading a forlorn hope in an unbroken wilder- 
ness, his was the high heart, the unconquerable mind. 
He was still the Captain of his soul. 

One of the most distinguished of the Mayflower Com- 
pany, Elder Brewster had been a spectator and an 
actor in great affairs. "With his "singular good gift of 
speech," what tales the old-time courtier must have 

^Bradford : Memoir of Elder Brewster. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 51 

told before the great fireplace on winter nights ; of the 
court of Queen Elizabeth and the embassy to Holland 
with Davison; the execution of Mary Queen of Scots 
and the coming of the Spanish Armada, when Catho- 
lics and Protestants, remembering only that they were 
Englishmen, stood shoulder to shoulder at the muster 
of Tilbury, Or did he speak with bated breath of that 
fatal October morning when with silent and awe- 
stricken multitudes he stood in Palace Yard and saw 
Sir Walter Raleigh, the bravest of the brave, pass on 
his way to dusty death? Brewster was in London at 
this time, and it is not unlikely he may have witnessed 
the tragedy which so deeply stirred true English 
hearts. There was no lack of great themes to stimulate 
fine talk at New England firesides. News of events 
vital to the rav-^e drifted overseas. Of absorbing inter- 
est was the Thirty Years' war and the wonderful 
cai'eer of Gustavus Adolphus, champion of freedom, 
who died that others might live. The names of Sir 
John Eliot and Pym and Hampden were known and 
honored in early New England. Rich in great memo- 
ries, the colonial fireside was by no means a dull and 
uninteresting place. Whatever our forebears may have 
lacked in material conveniences and luxuries they 
were not wanting in fine society and cultivated asso- 
ciations. The tale of Othello's adventures was not 
more thrilling than the story of the heroic beginnings 
of NeAv England. 

It is a mistake to presume that our Pilgrim and 
Puritan fathers were in any sense stolid and unimag- 



52 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

inative persons. None the less because they named it 
religion was their eye fixed on the Ideal, though the 
beauty they sought was moral and spiritual rather than 
material and sensuous. Dante's Divine Comedy, the 
epic of Catholicism, and Milton's Paradise Lost, the 
epic of Puritanism, were born of the highest imagina- 
tion quite as much as Virgil 's -^neid or Tasso 's Jeru- 
salem Delivered. The Bible, from which our fathers 
drank as from a living spring, contains not ethical 
precepts alone, but history and poetry and philosophy 
expressed in language of singular beauty and power. 
Today it is an essential element in a liberal education. 
No other volume of the world 's literature has exercised 
so potent an influence on the life of man, or inspired 
such hope in the ultimate moral and spiritual perfect- 
ibility of the human race. 

The old Pilgrim and Puritan spirit, mellowed and 
enriched by manifold experiences, revealed itself anew 
in Emerson and Channing, in Lowell and Wliittier, 
while in the fullness of time Elder Brewster's love of 
letters and gracious scholarship flowered afresh in his 
descendant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

Alive to gentle influences, the associations of Elder 
Brewster 's life had fostered in him 

"High thoughts, and amiable words, 
And courtesy, and love of truth, 
And all that makes a man." 

No grim and iron-clad Puritan was he — "Sweet 
Brewster" his contemporaries called him, because of 
his rare personal charm and the daily beauty in his 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 53 

life which drew the hearts of all men to him. His 
high character and gracious personality won him the 
love of those Avithout, as well as of those within his 
own particular fold. Those fine lines of the poet on Sir 
Philip Sidney might have been written for Elder 
Brewster, who embodied in his life the highest elements 
of knighthood and pure nobleness, as well as for the 
knightly soul they celebrate : 

"A sweet, attractive kind of grace; 
A full assurance given by looks; 
Continual comfort in a face, 

The lineaments of Gospel books." 

In the darkest hours of Plymouth history he cared 
for the sick, and buried the dead, and comforted them 
that mourned. ' ' Gentle in his manliness, manly in his 
gentleness, ' ' his was the fineness of tempered steel, and 
his goodness had some edge to it. Truly, his gentle- 
ness had made him great. 

Whatever harshness and severity may have crept 
into later generations, the genuine Pilgrim spirit was 
full of courtesy and gentlehood, of high thoughts and 
aspirations, and it led far away from frivolity and 
worldliness to the things of the mind and the things 
of the soul. Richer than stocks and bonds, or any 
material possession whatsoever, is that fine inheritance 
with its clear outlook on the things which are eternal. 

In the absence of a regular pastor, Elder Brewster 
preached twice every Sunday, "both powerfully and 
profitably, to the great contentment of his hearers, 
and their comfortable edification." His eloquent 



54 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

speech is a matter of history, and Bradford tells us 
that he turned many to righteousness, "doing more in 
their behalf in a year, than many that have their hun- 
dreds a year do in all their lives. ' '^ 

No authentic likeness of Elder Brewster has come 
down to us, but one involuntarily thinks of the Wor- 
shipful Elder of the Pilgrims as a man of fine presence 
and courtly bearing, of pleasant speech and of a very 
cheerful spirit, yet tinctured with the high seriousness 
of one who has lived face to face with eternal verities. 
If it be true that 

"Soul is form, and doth the body make," 
then the dignity of a high purpose and years of noble 
living must inevitably have left their impress upon his 
features in letters of light. 

Sorrow had not spared the venerated Elder. One 
by one his loved ones had been gathered into the gar- 
ner, leaving him alone in his pilgrimage. The Elder's 
wife, once the lady of Scrooby Manor, then the devoted 
Pilgrim wife and mother, "dyed at Plimoth in New 
England the 17th of Aprill, 1627," worn out with the 
hardships of life in the wilderness. In that period of 
frequent marriages when one wife literally trod upon 
another's heels, it is a satisfaction to note that this 
gentle lady had no successor in her husband's heart 
and home. It was in harmony with Elder Brewster's 
finely tempered spirit that having loved his own, he 
loved them unto the end. That strong and faithful 
heart craved no substitutes — 

'Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 55 

"But in my spirit will I dwell, 

And dream my dream, and hold it true; 
For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, 
I cannot think the thing farewell." 

Two daughters, Faith Allerton and Prudence, wife 
of Governor Prince, died in the bloom of their woman- 
hood, a loss which must have wrung the father's heart, 
but nothing could shake the Elder's trust in the Divine 
Goodness. The storms which darkened his earthly 
habitation only drew him closer to the great Father of 
Lights. Cast down but not destroyed, it was not his 
nature to rest in gloom and negations, and ere long he 
took up the burden of life again with that cheerful- 
ness and serenity of soul which made him a tower of 
strength, as well as a son of consolation, to those about 
him. The remaining years of life were spent in the 
household of his son, Love Brewster, whose wife was a 
daughter of ]\Ir. William Collier, "the wealthiest man 
in Plymouth Colony and a liberal benefactor of the 
same." The homestead at Duxbury, with its gra- 
ciously hospitable atmosphere, must have been a 
delightful pjace to tarry in. Most revered of all was 
scholarly Elder Brewster, "so cheerful, sociable, and 
pleasant," and whose mind was richly stored with soul- 
stirring memories of the life beyond the sea. 

Under the fostering care of his glorious grandfather 
grew up the little motherless boy, the Major Isaac 
Allerton of later years, whose daughter in due season 
wedded a son of that fine old cavalier. Colonel Rich- 
ard Lee, thus uniting the first families of Virginia and 



56 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

Plymouth Rock/ From this union sprang Zachary 
Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista and the President of 
the United States. To those who believe in heredity 
and that a man is the sum total of all his ancestors, it is 
interesting to trace in the character of General Taylor 
the widely varying qualities of mind and heart which 
resulted in his unique and striking personality. The 
rare union of strength and gentleness, the simplicity 
and godly sincerity so native to him, together with the 
power to inspire others, might have come to him as a 
direct spiritual inheritance from the noble old Elder 
of Plymouth ; while his resourceful abilities as a man 
of war are plainly traceable to the Lees of Virginia, 
who, in every generation since the coming of the Cava- 
lier, have produced men of unusual military genius. 
Other descendants of Elder Brewster have been known 
in the gates, as the genial and gentle author, Donald 
G. Mitchell, the Right Rev. Bishop Brewster of Con- 
necticut, Benjamin Harris Brewster^ Attorney General 
of the United States in 1881, and Richmond Pearson 
Hobson, the hero of the Merrimae in the Spanish- 
American War. 

In spite of the many troubles and hardships he had 
passed through, Elder Brewster retained his health 
and faculties unimpaired until the sands of life had all 
run out. His was a beautiful old age, as serene and 
bright as an October day. Like the wise man of Seneca 
he had carried a divine mind through all the accidents 

'"Many of the greatest families in the South proudly trace their 
origin hack to the blood and loins of the Pilgrim Fathers." — Henry 
Watterson. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 57 

of human life. The shadows were closing about him, 
but in his inmost spirit all was light. To the noble old 
Pilgrim this world had ever been an inn to sojourn in, 
rather than a place of habitation. Sweetly, tranquilly, 
he prepared to depart. Until the last day he did not 
wholly keep his bed, and almost to the end he essayed 
to comfort those about him. Like the sun which sinks 
below the Western horizon leaving a pathway of light 
across great waters. Elder Brewster "sweetly departed 
this life unto a better," April 10, 1644. 

With the passing of the reverend Elder of the Pil- 
grims, the record of Governor Bradford passes off, 
says the historian Palfrey, ''into what is not so much 
a delineation of Brewster's character as a thanksgiving 
to God, who, for the joy of all who knew him, and the 
good of all whom he could serve, made him so brave 
and gentle, so faithful and generous, so frank and sym- 
pathizing, so 'peaceable, sociable, and pleasant,' so 
wise, modest, devout, and useful ; and it comes to a fit 
close with discourse on the high tendencies by which 
strength is unfolded from infirmity, and trouble blos- 
soms into joy. 

"Brewster had retired from courts before he be- 
came known to the associates of his later eventful 
years. Wlien Brewster died, William Bradford was 
fifty-three years old. The boy walking on Sundays 
along an English hedge-row path to seek unlicensed 
edification at the lips of Robinson and Clifton, had 
first looked on Brewster with the veneration which a 
neophyte feels for the veteran who may soon be a mar- 



58 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

tyr. Then in a company of men and women, devoted 
like themselves, they had passed over the sea, through 
and towards many sufferings, and for ten years had 
earned a hard livelihood by unaccustomed labor. 
Next coming to this 'outside of the world,' they had 
survived cold, famine, and a pestilence which through 
three months had employed them in nursing and bury- 
ing as many of their associates as it left alive. With 
others worthy of confidence and esteem, they had given 
their harmonious direction to the common counsels — 
themselves the most trusted and revered of all — and 
had lived to see the issue of their generous cares in the 
establishment of an humble but prosperous common- 
wealth. All that had happened between the first 
meeting at Scrooby Manor and the present hour, all 
the long past scenes through which the writer and the 
departed had walked hand in hand, must have risen to 
the mind of Governor Bradford, who from laying in 
the earth the form longer familiar to his eyes than any 
they could ever look upon again, turned back to duties 
thenceforth to be fulfilled with less experienced com- 
nnniou'ship."^ 

To Plymouth Colony, inured to sorrow, it was the 
sorest loss that had hitherto befallen them, while to 
Bradford, no longer young, this world must henceforth 
have seemed a lonelier place. Governor Bradford was 
a man after Elder Brewster's own heart, and the 
friendship so happily begun amidst the smiling fields 

'John G. Palfrey. History of New England, Vol. 1, P. 598, 
Edition 1876. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 59 

and hedgerows of Old England had been a mutual 
solace and support through years of arduous toil and 
difficulty. It was a far cry from Scrooby Manor to 
Eagle's Nest on the bleak New England shore, and 
when the beloved Elder answered the summons to 
come up higher Governor Bradford must have felt 
that something vital was severed from his life. It was 
in the evening of his days, following the death of 
Brewster, that Bradford wrote his priceless history, 
and this tale of long-past years is as absorbing in its 
interest as that of ^neas and his wanderings. It is a 
possession forever to the American people, the Genesis 
aijd Exodus of our national history. 

Twice-blessed is the nation that has such men as 
Elder Brewster and Governor Bradford standing at 
the portals of its history. One might almost fancy 
that, in a changed world and under widely varying 
conditions, the spirit of good King Alfred and of 
Bgeda, the first great English scholar, with their pas- 
sionate zeal for knowledge and true godliness, had 
descended visibly upon early New England. B^da's 
consecration to truth was not more absolute than that 
of the Pilgrim leaders, while the history of Plymouth 
Plantation is a grander record than the Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle. Like King Alfred of shining memory, 
Brewster and Bradford, so long as they lived, endeav- 
ored to live worthily, and to leave to the men who 
came after a remembrance of them in good works. 

''The spirit that guided Elder Brewster through 
the vicissitudes of life remained with him until his 



60 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

closing hours ; the content which had made him accept 
whatever came to him was his rest in the Almighty's 
will. * * * Brewster died as simply and grandly 
as he had lived ; with the Apostolic benediction on his 
lips, the last they knew of life, and the rest was silence 
until the end, and then the transfiguration, which 
made him grander in death than even he was in the 
life he had lived for humanity in America and for his 
God. ' ' Gentleman, Scholar, Christian, his name shines 
like a star among the pioneers of America. Chief 
among the benefactors of mankind. Lord Bacon ranks 
the founders of states and commonwealths. A recog- 
nized historic founder of Plymouth Plantation, the 
Elder of the Mayflower stands for all time a noble and 
impressive figure in the foreground of American 
history. 

Despite the limitations of their age and creed, 
nobler and more august figures are not to be found in 
any nation's history, whether ancient or modern, than 
those of the mighty fathers of this favored land. Most 
fortunate in our origin and institutions, the future of 
America depends upon its fidelity to the great princi- 
ples and ideals which guided our fathers m their diffi- 
cult and dangerous pathway. 

The Age of the Pilgrims has been .justly styled the 
heroic period of our history. On that lonely outpost of 
civilization our fathers made the supreme sacrifice, 
and demonstrated their right to lead "the forlorn 
hopes of all great causes till time shall be no more." 
Three hundred years had passed away, when another 



ELDER BREWSTER AND HIS TIME 61 

heroic period dawned upon the world, freighted with 
infinite consequences to mankind. Once more the Gray- 
Champion walked his rounds in the Old Bay State, 
type of the hereditary spirit of New England, and the 
pledge that America's soldiers of liberty would vindi- 
cate their ancestry on blood-drenched fields, in the 
fiercest struggle for human freedom that has ever been 
waged upon this earth. From out the dust of three 
hundred years the Spirit of the Pilgrims arose like a 
flame upon an altar, renewing and consecrating afresh 
the Soul of America to high deeds in the service ot 
mankind. 

The return of the Mayflower in 1917, like the com- 
ing of the Mayflower in 1620, was a turning-point in 
the World 's history. Chateau Thierry and St. Mihiel 
and the Argonne M^ere as vital to the destinies of man- 
kind as Marathon and Tours and the defeat of the 
Spanish Armada. Born of the stanch Mayflower 
breed, the sons of the Pilgrims and those adopted sons 
of whatever name or race who, in heart and spirit have 
entered into the Pilgrim inheritance, were not men to 
turn back in the days of battle. In the Valley of 
Decision, like their great forefathers, they were "first 
in all adventures and f orwardest in any. ' ' 

"The waves that beat on Plymouth Rock 

Bore men who would be free, 
Stern scions of an ancient stock 

Who loved democracy. 
They brought the Bible and the sword, 

And manful faith beside; 
Here built they temples to the Lord 

That freemen sanctified. 



62 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

"Then did the tides from Plymouth Rock, 

From all our sweeping coasts, 
Bear men to brave the battle's shock. 

To fight with Freedom's hosts. 
The seas that brought the fathers here 

Called back the sons again, 
To rid the world of doubt and fear 
And make it free for men." 

Compared with these achievements, the glory of 
Alexander and Caesar were but as the brightness of a 
comet, but the glory of the Pilgrim Fathers, and of 
their martyred sons, is like the glory of the stars that 
shine forever and ever. 



OUR PILGRIM MOTHERS 




Pilgrim Lovers 



OUR PILGRIM MOTHERS. 

"Though rude the air, and chill 

With melting snow, and winds are blowing keen, 
The pink arbutus still 

Steps bravely out, hooded in brown and green. 

"From blast and frost and ice, 

She gathers strength, with craft both wise and sweet; 
She stores her hoards of spice; 
In poverty, rounds out. a life complete. 

"Here on New England's hills 

Dwell Mayflower maidens brave and fair and good, 
Whose sturdy sweetness fills 

Each lonely home, as these perfume the wood. 

"Sweet-vested Pilgrim flower. 

Daughter of sun and snow, and peace and wrath. 
Give to our girls for dower 

Such strength and sweetness as the mayflower hath." 

< 
Poring over the records of years long past, we 

long to know more concerning our forebears. What 
manner of persons were they, what were they like in 
their daily walk and conversation? As Cuvier from 
a bone or a scale reconstructed the organism to which 
it had once belonged, so, aided by the imagination 
and a hint gleaned here and there from the musty 
records of by-gone years, we are able in some mea- 



56 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

sure to breathe the breath of life into the men and 
women of centuries past, and to understand some- 
what the mental and spiritual characteristics of our 
ancestors. 

Of choice metal were these Pilgrim and Puritan 
women who followed with deathless loyalty the for- 
tunes of their husbands, and the evidence is indisput- 
able that they were fitting help-mates for high-souled 
men. The mothers of New England were spiritually 
akin to the noble Spanish lady, who said to her hus- 
band as he was preparing to depart to the unknown 
coasts of the new world. " Wliithersoever your des- 
tiny shall drive you, either by the furious waves of 
the great ocean, or by the manifold and horrible 
dangers of the land, I will surely bear you company. 
There can be no peril chance to me so terrible, nor 
any kind of death so cruel, that shall not be much 
easier for me to abide than to live so far separate 
from you." 

In the fierce fire of soul-searching experiences the 
sweet words of Ruth to Naomi must often have been 
on their lips and in their hearts. Not alone in the 
Mayflower, but in every ship that bore New England 
colonists oversea 

"There was woman's fearless eye 
Lit by her deep love'^ truth." 

Under the Puritan garb beat hearts as true and ten- 
der as those of Penelope and Alcestis, or any other 
woman in song or story. Now and then across the 
centuries we catch glimpses of the beautiful wo- 



OUK PILGRIM MOTHERS 67 

manhood in Katherine Carver or Margaret Win- 
throp. and it would be gratifying to know more con- 
cerning the beloved and only wife of Elder Brewster, 
the gracious lady whose married life began in 
Scrooby Manor and ended on the bleak shores of 
Xew England. The picture which Arlo Bates has 
drawn of a true Xew England woman undoubtedly 
portrays the spiritual characteristics of that devoted 
gentlewoman who shared the fortunes of the famous 
Elder of Plymouth. Mistress Mary Brewster was the 
prototype of the saintly women that the spirit of 
Puritanism bred in early Xew England — a type 
which under changed conditions and varying circum- 
stances was instinct with the courage and supreme 
devotion of St. Theresa or Frances de Chantal — 

"Such women are the living embodiment of the 
power which has inspired whatever is best in the 
nation : the power which has been a living force 
amid the worldliness, the materialism, the crudity, 
that have threatened to overwhelm the people of this 
yet young land, so prematurely old. In such faces 
was a look of high unworldliness that marks the mys- 
tic, the inheritance from ancestors bred in a faith 
impossible without mysticism in the very fibres of the 
race. The heroic self-denial, the persistent belief, the 
noble fidelity to the ideal which is the salvation of a 
nation, shine in such a countenance, and make real 
the high deeds of a past generation, the narrowness 
of whose creeds too often blinds us today to the great- 
ness of their character. ' ' 



68 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

Beautiful stories of old time loves and lovers have 
drifted down to us, among them one of Governor 
Carver and his wife, Katherine, and of their last 
days in the wilds of New England. After giving 
due praise to the fine, manly character of the Gov- 
ernor, the old record briefly states that "His wife, 
who was also a gracious woman, lived not six weeks 
after him; she being overcome with excessive grief 
for the loss of so gracious a husband, likewise died." 
A whole volume of poetry and romance is wrapped 
up in these simple lines. How infinitely touching 
are some of these old records with their brief stories 
of devotion and self-sacrifice ! They honor human 
nature. 

The quaint old love letters of Governor Winthrop 
show how large a niche love occupied in the lives of 
our serious old Puritan forefathers and foremothers. 
Under their somber garb hearts throbbed and thrilled 
with the tenderest human affections. Perhaps in- 
deed, it was this earnest, serious element in them 
which made their loves and beliefs strike such deep 
root. These records of bygone times are like some 
sweet, old-fashioned garden full of myrtle and Star 
of Bethlehem and Life-Everlasting. 

It does not require a great age of steam and in- 
vention and material progress to develop the highest 
products of human nature. The divine instincts of 
the soul burst into immortal bloom and beauty in 
the dreariest place, under the hardest and most ad- 
verse conditions, like the little flower that sprang up 



OUR PILGRIM MOTHERS 69 

between the chinks of the stone pavement in the 
Count de Charney's prison. 

From the earliest days New England has been 
prolific in women of a singularly high type of mind 
and character. Fine mentally and spiritually, those 
Puritan women Avere liberally endowed with that 
fine intelligence which is the birthright of the New 
Englander in every generation. "Gentle, pure- 
minded, high-souled, they drew in with their first 
breath that spiritual ozone, which makes itself felt 
like an electric force in the best types of all those 
hardy people dwelling along the shores of the his- 
toric Bay." Women and men alike were content 
to act well their parts and leave the result to God. 
The piety of our foremothers was no leaf of faded 
green pressed between the pages of the Geneva Bible 
or Ainsworth's Psalm Book, but a plant of perennial 
bloom, shedding its fragrance alike amid the heats 
of summer and the snows of winter. 

The zeal for education burned brightly in the 
hearts of New England women, and it was a colonial 
mother who said to her little son, "Child, if God 
make of thee a good Christian and a good scholar 
thou hast all thy mother ever asked for thee." A 
past mistress in home economics, the true New Eng- 
land woman was not content to live by bread alone. 
In the laborious days of pioneer life in the wilder- 
ness, material drudgery unredeemed by spiritual 
values was far removed from her idea of the dignity 
of life. Mental and spiritual sustenance was vitally 



70 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

necessary, and in all that constitutes the life of the 
spirit our foremothers were as wise as we. 

The social and family life of Pilgrim and Puritan 
was a life of action rooted and grounded in the life 
of thought. Great themes were pondered at colonial 
firesides. Nowhere, in any age of the world, have 
conscience and the keenest intellectuality been more 
equally yoked together. The common tasks and 
homely duties of the work-a-day world were per- 
formed under the quickening influence of the highest 
thought; and this ceaseless meditation on the deep 
things of religion and of human society produced 
that New England type of mind, which Ezra Hoyt 
Byington says is still as distinct in the great stream 
of American life as the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic. 
"Wonderful men and women have come forth from 
that little rugged, rocky land, dedicated to high 
things from the beginning of its history, with great 
traditions forever pointing upward. 

In intrinsic value, the social life of our foremoth- 
ers was not inferior to our o'^m. We have gained in 
extent and variety of amusements, but we have lost 
much in the passing of the simple yet genial and 
gracious hospitality of the olden time. The old New 
England teas of past generations, refined and dainty, 
linger in the memory like the fragrance of dried 
lavendar and wild roses. Fancy loves to dwell upon 
the fine, old-fashioned hospitality which added zest 
to the lives of the Bradfords and Brewsters and 
"Winslows, of the Princes and Southworths and Stan- 



OUR PILGRIM MOTHERS 71 

dishes, true Brahmins all, and representing the best 
social element of the Old Colony. 

The finely touched spirits of our foremothers had 
their fine issues in home-loving and home-keeping. 
Those nations are said to be most fortunate which 
have no history ; and perhaps those women are hap- 
piest whose annals are made up of 

"A little loving life of sweet small works." 

To be the true wife of a true man, to have her hus- 
band known in the gates, and her sons and daughters 
rise up and call her blessed, is career enough for any 
woman. There has been no new dignity given woman 
in the present that they did not possess in the old colo- 
nial day. The virtues of the spindle half were no 
small asset in the household life of the olden time. 
The Portia of Brutus, Cato's daughter, was not a 
nobler helpmate than these colonial wives and mothers, 
v^'tho made 

"The humble house and the modest apparel of homespun, 
Beautiful with their beauty, and rich with the wealth 
of their being." 

Abigail, that woman of "good understanding and of 
a beautiful countenance," was the prototype of many 
a New England wife and mother. Keenly alive to 
the higher values of human existence, never were 
women better fitted to become the mothers of men 
than in the Colonial and Revolutionary days. The 
spirit which flamed high in Abigail Adams and Mercy 
Warren was a direct legacy from the women of the 
Mayflower and the Arbella. Inspired from on high 



72 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

to choose the great deed and word, the foremothers 
of America, in true dignity and nobility of character 
and purpose, set an example to posterity which the 
modern woman with all her advantages and oppor- 
tunities cannot hope to surpass. In all that pertains 
to the higher womanhood and the life of the spirit 
she can but follow after. 



PURITANISM 
And It's Work In America 



PURITANISM AND ITS WORK IN AMERICA 

For a long period there existed in many minds a 
tendency to relegate to limbo the Puritan and his 
ways, but no nation which deserves to rank high in 
the scale of civilization can permanently ignore the 
deeds and characters of its founders. The American 
people are coming to look back with ever increasing 
interest to the beginnings of their history, and to , 
feel a just pride in their spiritual and political an- 
cestry. It is said that most great nations have been 
mixed nations, and that in every case some one ele- 
ment has had power to take the heterogeneous ma- 
terial and mould it into its own likeness. America 
is a mixed nation, and Puritanism is the force which 
has shaped its destinies. 

The influences which have contributed most to 
shape the world's history have usually had small be- 
ginnings. Very humble and insignificant the early 
christians must have looked to the great ones of the 
earth, yet they built up a dominion which outlived 
Caesar, and still rules the consciences of men. It 
was simply to raise supplies for the crown with 
greater facility that Edward the First made the at- 
tendance of the sturdy English burgesses a permanent 



76 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

feature of parliament, little dreaming what a mighty 
political structure future generations would rear on 
the foundation he unwittingly laid. The rise of the 
Saracen power, which menaced every throne in 
Europe, began when the camel driver of Mecca un- 
folded to a small circle of his kinsmen his belief in 
his new mission as the prophet of Allah. 

None but a person of prophetic vision could have 
divined that the small body of exiles, who fled from 
the persecutions of Bloody Mary, carried in their 
midst the ark of English liberty. Yet so it was. Dur- 
ing their residence in Frankfort and Geneva the 
Puritan movement began to gather a force and mo- 
mentum which in England, a century later, was to 
sweep away as with a flood the last lingering rem- 
nants of kingly tyranny and mediaeval superstition. 
Growing in strength throughout the reign of Eliza- 
beth, Puritanism culminated in the time of the Stuarts. 
Henceforth, while ceasing to be the most prominent 
factor in national affairs, it became one of those silent, 
invisible influences which from that day to this have 
moulded the life and thought of English speaking 
peoples. Wlierever it appeared, whether in the old 
world or in the new, Puritanism was a life giving 
spirit, and activity, thrift, freedom and intelligence 
followed in its train. 

In studying the chemistry of the Puritan spirit, 
we are struck with the predominance of certain great 
elements. The first of these is sincerity. It would 
have been impossible for any true Puritan to be a 



PURITANISM IN AMERICA 77 

time server or a Mr. Facing-Both Ways. He meant 
what he said, and he said what he meant. The Puri- 
tan was no blind votary of any sect or party. He 
was pre-eminently a thinking being, and in all things, 
great and small, diligently examined every claim 
made upon his obedience by the powers that be, and 
accepted or rejected the claim as it accorded or not 
with the law of God. He utterly scouted the doctrine 
that whatever is, is right, and that God is on the side 
of the strongest battalions. His idea of political and 
religious responsibility was such that it constrained 
him not to "stand in," but to stand out, when wrong 
and wickedness were rife in high places — an element 
which is much needed in American politics in this 
day of professional politicians, whose aims are not 
their country 's, nor God 's, nor truth 's. 

The Puritan had the courage of his convictions. 
Once assured that he was in line with God's plans 
and purposes he did not fear what man could do unto 
him. When duty led the way the Puritan onset was 
like the charge of the Light Brigade : 

"Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs but to do and die," 

If they lived, they lived unto the Lord; if they 
died, they died unto the Lord. The most practical 
and sagacious of mortals when dealing with the af- 
fairs of this work-a-day world, the Puritan was none 
the less emphatically an idealist. As a sunbeam 
touches at the same time the earth and the sun, so 
he, while firmly grasping things temporal, yet walked 



78 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

hourly in the presence of the unseen and eternal. He 
journeyed in its light, and labored in its hope. An- 
other striking characteristic of the Puritan was his 
profound respect for man as man. In an age of over- 
powering, social distinctions, he it was who taught 
the down-trodden peasant and drudge to look into 
the face of kings and not tremble. A century ago 
Burns declared that 

''The rank is but the guinea stamp; 
The man's the gowd for a' that," 

but the Puritan discovered and announced it long 
before. The Puritan cherished a mighty belief in 
God and his righteousness. He could not believe 
that the power which upholds this world would ever 
faint or fail until it had brought forth judgment unto 
victory. 

The defects of the Puritan spirit were a disregard 
for the minor graces and elegancies of life, and a 
lack of sympathy with minds differently constituted 
from its OAvn. But lately emerged from the darkness 
of the medivaeal time it is not surprising if the Puri- 
tan sometimes stumbled and fell short of his OM^n 
high ideals. The narrowness which is laid to his 
charge is but as a spot on the sun, or as the early 
mists which obscure for a moment the dawn of a 
glorious morning. His errors and deficiencies Avere 
inseparable from the age in which he lived ; his vir- 
tues were all his own. The depth, the earnestness, 
the sincerity of the Anglo-Saxon mind found its 
full expression in Puritanism. 



PURITANISM IN AMERICA 79 

Though not existing as an organized body imtil 
the close of the sixteenth century, the Puritan spirit 
is confined to no land or clime, but takes root and 
flourishes wherever a human soul aspires to be 
"noble clay plastic under the almighty effort." Jo- 
seph was a Puritan, and Daniel no less so. The no- 
blest of the stoic philosophers were Puritans inas- 
much as their hearts were set on virtue. That alone 
was their being's end and aim. Whatever might be 
their portion, whether wealth or poverty, joy or 
sorrow, it mattered not, for their true life soared 
aloft untouched and unharmed by the storms of 
this lower world. The noble Simon De Montfort, 
who "stood like a pillar," unshaken by promise or 
threat or fear of death, resolute only to do the right 
as Clod gave him to see it, was a Puritan of the most 
exalted type. 

This evergreen plant, which defies all climate and 
all time, burst at last into immortal bloom on the 
rock-bound shores of New England. Among the 
world's events, few have been fraught with higher 
import to the race than the landing of that forlorn 
little band of pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, December 
21, 1620. Other colonies, as Carlyle says, helped to 
form the body of America, but here was the soul to 
animate it. In the Pilgrim character we behold as in 
a glass the highest elements of the Puritan spirit with 
but little of its dross. With many sweet and gentle 
virtues their souls were cast in that heroic mould 
which is ready to dare all and endure all for the sake 



80 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

of its highest convictions. The Pilgrims were Puri- 
tans, but Puritans broadened, elevated, and ennobled 
by the most varied experiences of life. During their 
residence in Holland, sorrow and want, those stern 
levelers of all human distinctions, fostered the demo- 
cratic tendencies which were one day to germinate 
in the virgin soil of New England. Living for years 
among peoples of widely differing faiths, they 
learned a wider toleration than it was given their 
brethren, the English Puritans, to know. In religion, 
as in politics, the watchword of the Pilgrim was 
Progress. On the eve of their departure for the new 
world their reverend pastor. Rev. John Robinson, 
admonished them that God had not yet revealed his 
whole will unto them, but that new light and new 
truth would still break forth from His holy word — 
memorable words which a modern writer declares 
are worthy to take rank with Washington's farewell 
address, or Lincoln's immortal utterances at Gettys- 
burg. It was the steadfast purpose of this devoted 
band "to walk in all the ways which God had made 
known or should make known unto them," and to 
uphold and defend the great principles of civil and 
religious liberty, whatsoever it should cost them. 

"The Greek," says James Russell Lowell, "may 
boast of his Thermopylae, but we may well be proud 
of our Plymouth Rock, where a handful of men, wo- 
men and children not merely faced but vanquished 
the winter, the wilderness, disease and famine, and 
the still more invincible homesickness, which drew 



PURITANISM IN AMERICA 81 

them back to the green island far away. They found 
no lotus growing on the surly shore, the taste of 
which could make them forget their little native 
Ithica, nor were they so wanting to themselves in 
faith as to burn their ships, but saw the fair west 
wind belly the homeward sail, and then turned un- 
repining to grapple with the terrible Unknown." 

Plymouth Rock has been the scene of many a trial 
and the fulfillment of many a high resolve. It was 
here that a government, based on the consent of the 
governed, was first established on the American con- 
tinent. "No people had so fully appreciated the 
rights of each member of the state and the inherent 
dignity of manhood, or entertained such cheering 
hopes of human improvement." Athens has been 
called the mother of modern civilization, and cer- 
tainly New England is the mother of much that is 
noblest and best in the political and social institu- 
tions of America. The sternness and austerity of the 
Puritans was confined chiefly to religion. Pew of 
the nations of Europe have made their criminal laws 
so humane as those of early Ncav England. In many 
respects their punishments were milder than penal- 
ties imposed by modern American legislation. Even 
the brute creation was not forgotten, cruelty to ani- 
mals being a civil offense. 

Broad and deep they laid the foundation of our 
national life. Education, morality, religion, inde- 
pendence, and eventually toleration, were the rock 
upon which they reared their temple of liberty, 



82 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

against which the storms and floods of more than two 
hundred years have dashed in vain. To those great 
silent men, who, with so much toil and suffering, 
"broke the ice for others who came after with less 
difficulty, ' ' the honor shall belong to the world 's end 
of founding a free and happy country. 

"It was a century of prodigies," says Rev. John 
Hurst, "and not least among them were those cos- 
mopolitan and heroic bands of colonists which it sent 
to people the Western hemisphere. There was an 
element of high moral purpose in them for which we 
search in vain in the colonial plantings of Phoenicia, 
Carthage and Rome. In fact, the nations themselves, 
which in the Seventeenth century furnished scions 
for the new life here, were never, either before or 
since, permitted to produce for distant lands men of 
equally elevated motives, fine intellects and far- 
reaching destiny." Imagination loves to dwell on 
these grand old forefathers of America in their poor 
cottages in the wilderness, fighting a good fight and 
leaving the world a little better than they found it. 
Hard and homely as must have been the details of 
their daily lot, they need no pity of ours, for heroism 
was there, and wisdom and true godliness — all that 
most dignifies and embellishes the life of man. 

Many of the fathers of the republic sleep in un- 
known graves. No storied urn marks their last rest- 
ing place, but it is not needed, for the memory of 
their faithful, patient, heroic lives is graven deep in 
the hearts of the American people. Through the 



PURITANISM IN AMERICA 83 

length and breadth of the land they have builded 
unto themselves, in the form of schools and churches, 
of free civil and religious institutions, a monument 
whose effect upon the collective life of mankind is 
as enduring as the Pyramids. In these latter days 
Puritanism has marched from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific, and under her magic touch the wilderness 
and waste places blossom as the rose. Whether 
America is to go on untrammeled in her noble career, 
or sink into the strange and degenerate branch of a 
most noble vine, depends upon the fidelity with which 
she cherishes the virtues and principles of her foun- 
ders ; their steady scorn of wrong, whether in high 
or low places, their shining courage and high spirit- 
ual daring. Though all things else do perish as a 
leaf, these attributes are of perennial value, and will 
continue to shine with undiminished lustre until the 
heavens roll up like a scroll, and the earth and the 
sea shall flee away. 



Wild was the day; the wintry sea 

Moaned sadly on New England's strand. 

When first, the thoughtful and the free, 
Our fathers, trod the desert land. 

They little thought how pure a light, 

With years, should gather 'round that day; 

How love should keep their memories bright, 
How wide a realm their sons should sway. 

Green are their bays; but greener still 
Shall round their spreading fame be wreathed, 

And regions, now untrod, shall thrill 

With reverence, when their names are breathed. 

Till where the sun, with softer fires, 

Looks on the vast Pacific's sleep 
The children of the pilgrim sires 

This hallowed day like us shall keep. 

William CuUen Bryant, 1829. 



•SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS 
OF LIBERTY IN AMERICA" 

A Review of 



"SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS OF 
LIBERTY IN AMERICA,"* A REVIEW OF. 

In reviewing this book we shall first consider 
briefly the third chapter, which treats of the sources 
from Avhich Shakespeare drew the material for his 
wonderful drama. 

Tlie Tempest is based upon the shipwreck of the 
Sea Venture in the Bermudas, the Sea Venture being 
one of a fleet of seven good ships and pinnaces which, 
in June, 1609, set out from Plymouth, England, for 
Virginia. It seems conclusive that Shakespeare had 
inside information which could have come to him 
only through intimate association with those large- 
minded Elizabethans who were devising liberal 
things for the New World beyond the Atlantic. Some 
of the most striking incidents in the play were drawn 
from a confidential letter written by William Stra- 
chey, one of the survivors of the wrecked Sea Ven- 
ture, and which was not made public until long after 
the occurrence. Its contents were known only to 
those men who were directing the affairs of the Vir- 
ginia Company, to whom the letter was sent. 

*Charles Mills Gayley, Dean of Berkeley and Governor of the 
Society of Mayflower Descendants in California. 



90 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

Nothing in Shakespeare's play can exceed the 
vividness of William Strachey's description of the 
horrors of that storm. The fire flaming here and 
there over the ship, and in many places at once, is 
given only in the letter of Strachey, and incorporated 
by Shakespeare into his great drama, and attributed 
by him to the magic of Ariel. To students of Shake- 
speare it is well worth while to read in detail the 
third chapter of Mr. Gayley's book. 

The aim of that author is not so much a study of 
Shakespeare's plays as to demonstrate conclusively 
the close affiliation of the great dramatist with those 
contemporary thinkers and statesmen, the Earl of 
Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, Richard Hooker, 
and others, who were leading their native land to 
higher levels. Those freedom-loving men left an 
indelible mark upon the fortunes of Colonial Virginia 
and upon the New England colonies, and laid the 
foundations of constitutional government in the New 
World. 

Three hundred years ago the rights of Colonies 
were not well understood by European rulers, and a 
liberal party, or Patriots, as they were styled in Par- 
liament and in the Virginia Company, were strug- 
gling to plant colonies in the New World under lib- 
eral auspices, and to secure to the inhabitants and 
their posterity "all the liberties, franchises, and im- 
munities of British subjects." In 1618, through the 
efforts of these Patriots, the first representative gov- 
ernment in America was established in Virginia. It 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS OF LIBERTY 91 

provided that ''no orders from London should be 
binding on the colony unless ratified by her Assem- 
bly. Upon the charters thus culminating all future 
rights and liberties of the colonies, north and south, 
of the Revolutionary America of 1775, and of the 
Republic of today are built. ' ' 

The real import of Mr. Gayley's most interesting 
book is to bring home to our minds the fact of the 
common heritage of England and America, and a 
deeper perception that the future of the world de- 
pends largely upon the harmonious co-operation of 
English-speaking peoples. The Anglo-Saxon race is 
the natural custodian of the sacred fire of liberty and 
constitutional government. 

"America," says Justin McCarthy, 'can never 
afford in all her greatness to be unmindful of the 
land of Shakespeare and Cromwell, and John Milton ; 
the land that gave her the dauntless men and women 
of the Mayflower, who with 'empires in their brains,' 
and the love of liberty in their hearts, laid the cor- 
nerstone of American greatness." 

Our own historian, John Fiske, says of England 
a quarter of a century later, "If ever there were men 
who laid down their lives in the cause of all man- 
kind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watch- 
words were texts of Holy Writ, whose battle cries 
were hymns of praise. By saving liberty in England 
they also saved it in America." 

The student of history is often struck with the 



92 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

intimate connection of events far removed in time 
and space. Everything is related to that which has 
gone before, and to that which follows after. The 
beginnings of our country are deeply rooted in Eng- 
lish history. Our birthright privileges and ancestral 
spirit are writ large on every page of Anglo-Saxon 
history since the days of King Alfred and the Magna 
Charta, of Naseby and Marston Moor. The Barons' 
"War, led by Simon de Montfort, laid a sure founda- 
tion for yet undiscovered America. It is as impos- 
sible to understand early American history without 
constant reference to England and its great intel- 
lectual lights in society and government as it would 
be to study Hamlet with Hamlet left out. The finest 
minds of the Colonial age, as well as the minds of 
Washington and Adams and Jefferson, were colored 
by the traditions and principles they had drawn in 
with their mother's milk. 

Of this spirit was born the book of Charles Mills 
Gayley, an American of the Americans. It is like a 
window opening into the inmost mind of Shake- 
speare. We see him, not alone as a poet rolling his 
eyes in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth 
to heaven, but as a man among men, entering with 
keen sympathy and fellowship into the most impor- 
tant problems of human life and human government 
which it is given the sons of men to solve. 

How far was Shakespeare influenced by the spirit 
of his times? In various ways Mr. Gayley has an- 
sw'ered the question. Several plays reveal the very 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS OP LIBERTY 93 

image and body of Shakespeare's time, its form and 
pressure. Again and again, in sonnet and drama, he 
has given utterance to ideas akin to those which the 
Patriots of England sought to realize. The reforms 
that Sir Edwin Sandys sought to reduce to a concrete 
form in the New World, Shakespeare, while Ameri- 
can colonies were yet in the making, was implying 
poetically in the "weal of the common," founded 
on ordered service, justice and patriotism. 

In the sixteenth century, the spirit which had 
grown so great could no longer be confined within 
the narrow limits of the little "nook-shotten isle" 
called England. In the days of Elizabeth, the eyes of 
that sturdy and intrepid race were turning towards 
the brave New World beyond the sea, and so keen 
an intellect as Shakespeare's must inevitably have 
shared the hopes and fears and ambitions of his coun- 
trymen. 

"Shakespeare was acquainted with more than 
one of the English statesmen who wrested from King 
James the colonial charters by which, between 1606 
and 1620, English liberty was first planted in Vir- 
ginia and New England. That he had confidential 
relations with these English Patriots, the founders 
of American liberty, is proved by the contents and 
source of one of his plays. That Shakespeare was in 
sympathy with the teachings of the most eminent 
moral and political master of the liberal movement 
in England is manifest in many of the poet's works." 

Mr. Gayley goes on to say that the purpose of his 
book is to show "that the thoughts and even the 



94 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

words of that liberal thinker, Richard Hooker, passed 
into the minds of our revolutionary fathers and into 
the Declaration of Independence, and that the prin- 
ciples common to Shakespeare and Hooker, to Sir 
Edwin Sandys, Southampton, and the other Patriots 
of Seventeenth Century England, are the principles 
of liberty which America enjoys today." He also 
reminds us that, in the American Revolution, "the 
colonists were but asserting their rights as English- 
men under the charter and common law, and that 
the hearts of the truest and noblest Englishmen at 
home were with them in the struggle ; that the heri- 
tage of today is a heritage which for 1400 years has 
been ripening for the British Empire and America 
alike." 

The mighty struggle from which the world has 
just emerged was at bottom but an old foe with a 
new face. George the Third and the Hohenzollerns 
were birds of the self-same feather, both of them 
terrible exponents of German despotism. "Wash- 
ington," says Mr. Gayley, "was but asserting against 
a despotic sovereign of German blood and broken 
English speech the prerogative of the Anglo-Saxon 
breed, the faith of his liberal brothers in England." 
"The nursing mother of the three great modern 
democracies — the United States of America, the 
Union of Free Commonwealths styled the British 
Empire, and the present French Republic — was the 
liberal England of Shakespeare and Hooker, and the 
Patriots of early Seventeenth Century England." 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS OF LIBERTY 95 

One strong impelling reason for emigrating to the 
New World was the longing in the hearts of the 
Pilgrim exiles to preserve to their latest posterity the 
name and language, and laws, of their native land. 
"They were, every man and woman of them, English 
to the backbone. All alike were of that stock and 
breeding which made the Englishmen of the days of 
Bacon and Shakespeare." Under the spell of Mr. 
Gayley's most illuminating book, the words of Gov- 
ernor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, the first Ameri- 
can historian, uttered almost three centuries ago, 
take on new meaning. In his famous History of Ply- 
mouth Plantation, the Genesis and Exodus of Ameri- 
can history. Governor Bradford, recounting for their 
children's children all the way the Pilgrims had been 
led by the Most High God, said : 

"May and ought not the children of these fathers 
to say, Our fathers were Englishmen, who came over 
this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this 
wilderness. But they cried unto the Lord, and He 
heard their voice, and looked on their adversity. 
Let them confess before the Lord his loving kind- 
ness, and His wonderful works unto the children of 
men." 

All that we enjoy today has been bought with a 
price. We are children of yesterday and heirs of 
all the ages. 

In every epoch of history we find nere and there 
master minds that act as pathfinders and pioneers, 
blazing the way for human progress. What John 



96 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

Milton was to a later period of English history, Rich- 
ard Hooker was to the Elizabethan world. Erasmus 
and Sir Thomas More and Richard Hooker dreamed 
of a nobler world than any yet realized, and those 
visions were to be the beacon lights of future gener- 
ations. It is difficult for us to comprehend how 
deeply Richard Hooker colored the best thought of 
his own day, and his influence widening like a circle 
in the water, still made itself felt when the Declara- 
tion of Independence was written a century and a 
half later. "To the broadest-minded, most learned, 
and most eloquent thinker and philosopher of the 
sixteenth century, not alone Sir Edwin Sandys and 
his compeers, but the initiators of the American Rev- 
olution owed the central concepts of their political 
philosophy." The political ideas in Richard the 
Second and in all of Shakespeare's plays, which refer 
to the relations of ruler and ruled, have been directly 
influenced by Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. 

Only second to Richard Hooker was his pupil. Sir 
Edwin Sandys, "a man of rare gifts and knowledge 
and great resoluteness, the incomparable leader of 
the liberal statesmen, one of the greatest men of a 
great age." The noblest patriot of the first quarter 
of the seventeenth century, Sir Edwin Sandys, 
drafted the charter of 1609 for Virginia, and to him 
was largely due the charter of 1618, which secured 
liberty and self-government to the Virginia Colony, 
and definitely created in the wilds of America a new 
House of Freedom. In 1618-19, Sir Edwin Sandys 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS OF LIBERTY 97 

exerted his utmost efforts to secure a liberal charter 
for Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims sailed away 
from their native land assured of "freedom of per- 
son, equality before the law, the right to participate 
in the government of themselves, and to enjoy all 
liberties, franchises, and immunities as if they had 
been abiding within the realm of England." How 
deeply the leaders of the Mayflower enterprise had 
imbibed the spirit of Richard Hooker and Sir Edwin 
Sandys is evinced by their regard for the common 
weal, "each for all, and all for each," and for just 
and equal laws based upon the consent of the gov- 
erned, and which were embodied in the compact 
drawn up and signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, 
November, 1620. Governor Winslow tells us that 
Sir Edwin Sandys loaned the Pilgrims 300 pounds 
without interest for three years, which was repaid. 

"Such," says Charles Mills Gayley, "has been 
the service rendered by Sandys to the founders of 
New England. There can be no doubt that the quali- 
ties displayed by William Brewster, as elder of the 
congregation in Leyden and afterwards in the Plym- 
outh Colony, were colored by long association with 
his 'very loving friend,' Sir Edwin Sandys, as well 
as by a first-hand acquaintance with the printed word 
of Richard Hooker. This is reflected in the genial 
humanity, the liberal knowledge and outlook, the 
conservative wisdom, with which the historic Elder 
molded the civil polity of the first settlement in New 
England, and held in check tendencies elsewhere 



98 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

manifested toward religious bigotry and oppres- 
sion. ' ' 

That eminent authority on Pilgrim History, Rev. 
Henry Martyn Dexter, says: "The New Plymouth 
of 1620 found much of its best interpretation in the old 
life which, sadly, yet with a great hope, the Mayflower 
was leaving behind the hazy hills of Cornwall, as she 
drew away from them westward on her eventful voy- 
age. The traditions, habits and methods of Old Eng- 
land became prime factors of their great endeavor 
here." The more we study this subject the deeper 
becomes our realization of the debt we owe to six- 
teenth and seventeenth century Englishmen. "The 
political principles that inspired Sandys, Southamp- 
ton, Selden, and all that noble company, never died 
out of the northern colony called New England. 
Disciples of Hooker, associates of Shakespeare, were 
the founders of the first republic in the New World. ' ' 

Since 1914 the attention of the civilized world has 
been drawn as perhaps never before to the rights of 
the individual and to the duty of the individual to 
the State In imperial Germany the man was re- 
duced to a mere cipher, of no more weight as a think- 
ing being than a rivet or a bolt in a vast machine. 
In our own beloved country we have, perhaps, erred 
by going to the other extreme, and by permitting 
individualism to run wild, oftentimes at the expense 
of the good of the whole. 

These great questions were as vital to Shake- 
speare's day as to our own. It is most interesting 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS OF LIBERTY 99 

to consider how men like Hooker and Sandys and 
Shakespeare approached problems which are like 
the riddles of the Sphinx, and for which society 
must find a correct solution or perish. To that ques- 
tion of questions — What are the rights of the indi- 
vidual; what are his duties to the State? — both 
Hooker and Shakespeare have given answers as valid 
in our time as in theirs. The tones and accents of 
these great Elizabethans echo down the centuries, 
begetting in us a keener sense of our own duties and 
responsibilities as citizens of no mean country. 

That the voice of the people, that is of collective 
humanity, is really God speaking through man, his 
instrument, is one of the principles of Richard Hooker, 
and one which lies at the very root of American insti- 
tutions. The origin of society and the body politic, 
and the concessions needful for the common good are 
ably set forth in the Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker, 
and the concepts of Shakespeare are shot through and 
through with the ideas of this great master. "No 
reader or thinker of that day could have escaped the 
influence of Hooker," says Mr. Gayley. The transi- 
tion from Natural to Positive Law, the end being the 
Pursuit of Happiness, and the good of the majority; 
the Consent of the Governed, the Right of Revolution, 
and Representative Government; were all familiar to 
the authors of the American Declaration of Independ- 
ence one hundred and fifty years later through John 
Locke, the disciple of Hooker, and whose political phil- 
osophy was based upon the arguments of the master 



100 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

thinker of sixteenth century England. Richard 
Hooker's epoch-making book was as fatal as dynamite 
to theories of the divine right of kings and other fal- 
lacies peculiar to the Hohenzollern type of mind three 
centuries ago. Not only to Sir Edwin Sandys, but to 
Shakespeare, all just government was based upon the 
consent of the governed. 

Yet Shakespeare was no mere imitator or echo of 
Richard Hooker, or of any other man however eminent. 
The spirit of God was moving upon the face of the 
waters, and these grand ideals pervaded the atmos- 
phere of Shakespeare's England. The master-dra- 
matist was singularly responsive to the noblest in- 
stincts and tendencies of his age and race. In Shake- 
speare 's political creed there was no room for auto- 
cracy and the divine right of kings. He upheld a 
nation's right to dethrone an unworthy king. He 
believed in national unity and the duty of individuals 
to work together for the common good. The masses 
of Europe has not reached the level of today, and 
Democracy as we understand it was not the ideal of 
the seventeenth century; but representative govern- 
ment so far as it had been evolved, had the approval 
of Shakespeare as it did that of Hooker and Sandys, 
and all that glorious company. 

The men who defended the Magna Charta, parlia- 
mentary freedom of speech and action, the responsi- 
bility of rulers, and the right of parliament to bring 
to judgment great officers of state, believed as our own 
forefathers did in the rule of "the Best." Hooker 
and Shakespeare and all the noblest minds of the time 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE POUNDERS OF LIBERTY 101 

held that men who bear rule over their fellows should 
be chosen because of superior merit and fitness. * ' Let 
no one," says Shakespeare, "presume to wear an unde- 
served dignity." If it were possible to keep power 
and authority in the hands of the unselfish and the 
wise and the noble, we should have taken a long step 
towards the millennium. 

Such were the conceptions of government which 
were carried to America by its early founders. "The 
thoughts that were common to Hooker and Shake- 
speare and Shakespeare's friends, the dream of the 
well-ordered state where merit shall govern, the ideals 
of individual worth, duty, and patriotism, were com- 
mon to our English forefathers, the planters of Vir- 
ginia, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower of Plymouth, the 
Puritans of Massachusetts Bay. . . . Bradford and 
Brew^ster, Winthrop and Endicott, John Cotton and 
Roger Williams, John Harvard and Thomas Hooker 
of New England, Alexander Whitaker, Clayborne and 
Nathaniel Bacon of Virginia, belong to the history of 
English ideals no less than to that of America. ' ' — ' ' It 
is to Shakespeare's England that the Americans of the 
colonies owed — that the Americans of today of what- 
ever stock they be, owe — ^the historic privileges that 
have made the New World a refuge for the oppressed 
and a hope for humanity." 

How deeply the colonial mind was imbued with 
the ideal of Liberty under the Law, is shown by the 
famous definition given by Governor Winthrop of 
Massachusetts Bay, in 1645, and which has been pro- 



102 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

nounced by distinguished publicists the Dest detinition 
of liberty in the English language. As defined by 
Winthrop. it was indeed a liberty for which a man 
should stand, if need be, not only at the hazard of his 
goods, but of his life. 

The New "World was a fruitful soil, and civil lib- 
erty and democracy took on large proportions from 
the outset. The noted preacher, Thomas Hooker, the 
founder of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1638 anticipated 
the fundamental principles of modern democracy. 
"The foundation of authority," he declared, "is laid 
in the free consent of people. They who have power 
to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power 
also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power 
and place into which they call them." The recall of 
unworthy judges and legislators of all kinds was well 
known, both in theory and practice, in early New 
England. 

The names of the Earl of Southampton, of Pem- 
broke, and Sir Edwin Sandys, are eternally affixed to 
the title deeds of liberty in the United States of Amer- 
ica. Their zeal for freedom secured to Virginia and 
New England the priceless boon of representative gov- 
ernment and equality before the Law. Neither the 
Dutch Colony of New Netherland, nor the French 
Colonies in Canada enjoyed the freedom and self- 
government of the English Colonies in America. 

Mr. Gayley's book is like a searchlight upon the 
colonial period of America. The seed sown by Hooker 
and Sandys, germinating and fructifying for one hun- 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE FOUNDERS OF LIBERTY 103 

dred and fifty years, resulted inevitably in the Declar- 
ation of Independence. The colonial age was but the 
necessary training and preparation of a great democ- 
racy, fully equipped for a new experiment in the 
annals of mankind. 

Thomas Jefferson truly said that "the ball of the 
Revolution received the first impulse, not from the 
actors in the events, but from the first colonists." 
American Independence was but the natural harvest 
of seed sown throughout the Colonial period, and trac- 
ing backward to men of English race and speech in 
the old home land. The beginnings lay far back in 
the days of small things, when the leaders and workers 
of the Colonial time wrought together on the founda- 
tions of a Temple of Liberty, to be reared in its full 
beauty and majesty by other hands than theirs. 

Shakespeare and the founders of liberty abhorred 
the doctrines of IMachiavelli, the Bernhardi of the six- 
teenth century. Both Machiavelli and modern Ger- 
many were actuated by the spirit of Mephistopheles — 
"the spirit that denies." This denial of all the great 
ideals of truth and justice, of freedom and common 
humanity between man and man, were utterly foreign 
to Shakespeare and his great contemporaries. Liberty 
and law grounded in righteousness, mercy, and peace, 
was the ideal of our forefathers ; and Mr, Gayley justly 
says that "the liberty we enjoy today is what it is, 
primarily because Southampton, Sandys, and other 
patriots were Englishmen, because the highminded 
men of the Virginia Colony and the Bradfords, Brew- 



104 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

sters, and Winthrops of New England were English- 
men, and established in the New World an advance 
guard of English liberty. ' ' 

Shakespeare was not the idle singer of an empty 
day, but every inch a man, deeply apprehending the 
most vital principles of human conduct and human 
government. His plays are not mere echoes of some- 
thing outside of him. Through them there is pulsing 
like a heartbeat his personal beliefs and convictions. 
He appreciated, as all truly great men must, the su- 
preme value of the moral and the ethical. His justice 
is of the moral law, the same for dynasties and nations 
as for the individual. No ''scrap of paper" entered 
into Shakespeare's scheme of things. 
"There sits a judge in heaven, whom no king can corrupt." 

Like our own Lincoln, he framed immortal phrases, 
because he served immortal issues. For timeservers 
and corruption in high places he had all the scorn of 
an honest and manly heart. 

In an age of rank and social distinction, we catch 
notes of the New Democracy. The keynote had been 
struck two hundred years before by Chaucer, in his 
high estimate of the worth and dignity of the personal 
soul, an idea which seems to be innate in the Anglo- 
Saxon race. "Honors thrive when rather from our 
acts we them derive, than our f oregoers, ' ' says Shake- 
speare, and again — 

"From lowest place whence virtuous things proceed, 
That place is dignified by the doer's deed." 



SHAKESPEARE AMD THE FOUNDERS OP LIBERTY 105 

These convictions, voiced long ago in the England 
of our forefathers, lie at the root of all that is best 
worth while in America and the life of today. 

The year 1588 was a turning-point in the world's 
history. The whole future of modern civilization was 
trembling in the balance. Of incalculable importance 
to mankind was the question whether it should be the 
world of the Spanish Inquisition, of Philip the 
Second, and the Duke of Alva, or the world of Shake- 
speare and Hampden and George "Washington. No 
United States of America was possible until the naval 
power of Spain was shattered by brave little England, 
The defeat of the Invincible Armada was the opening 
chapter in the history of the United States. Sixteenth 
century Englishmen settled a question no less vital 
to the human race than that of 1919, as to whether 
the American world, the world of England and of all 
freedom-loving peoples, or the German mind and pur- 
pose, should shape the destinies of mankind. 

"We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
That Shakespeare spake." 

The life-story of the United States is a chapter in 
universal history. It is part and parcel of the long 
struggle for justice, for freedom, for the equality of 
man before law, industrially as well as politically, 
which has gone on since the dawn of Anglo-Saxon his- 
tory ; and the godfathers of America were Hooker and 
Shakespeare and Sandys, Hampden and Pym and 
Cromwell, 

"Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in 



106 OLD PILGRIM DATS 

America," was wrritten in 1917 when America was at 
a white heat in the world-shaking struggle for the pres- 
ervation of those grand ideals and principles which 
men of the Anglo-Saxon blood have for centuries ac- 
counted their dearest possession. A more eloquent 
and convincing spokesman could scarcely have been 
found than Charles Mills Gayley. Writing in 1917 
he says : "In this period of conflict, the sternest that 
the world has known, when we have joined heart and 
hand with Great Britain, it may profit Americans to 
recall how essentially at one with Englishmen we have 
always been in everything that counts. That the 
speech, the poetry, of the race are ours and theirs in 
common, we know — they are Shakespeare. But that 
the institutions, the law and the liberty, the democracy 
administered by the fittest, are derived from Shake- 
speare 's England, and are Shakespeare too, we do not 
generally know, or if we have known, we do not always 
remember." The League of Nations and world-wide 
arbitration are but Richard Hooker's desire for "an 
universal fellowship Avith all men. ' ' 

From fifty-five to sixty-millions of our one hundred 
millions are exclusively or predominantly descended 
from the ancient stock which first landed on these 
shores three hundred years ago. But there is a pedi- 
gree of the mind and soul as well as of the body, and to 
all true Americans of whatever name or race, Charles 
Mills Gayley extends a w^elcome. ' ' To the descendants 
not of the blood alone but of the spirit, of the heart 
and conscience, of the faith and stem resolve, the un- 



SHAKESPEARE AJSTD THE FOUNDERS OF LIBERTY 107 

dying devotion to freedom, right, and unconquerable 
hope, this little book is dedicated." 

Charles Mills Gayley represents the very highest 
type of Americanism. The spirit of America, the great 
traditions and ideals of the fathers live and walk in 
him. In his mind is embodied the Heroic and Ideal 
America, with an unwavering faith in its great destiny 
and mission to mankind. 

Forty years ago, that benign and gracious spirit, 
Arthur Penryhn Stanley, wrote of our country: 
"Whether from the remarkable circumstances of its 
first beginnings, certain it is, that even from very early 
times a sense of a vast and mysterious destiny unfold- 
ing in a distant future, had taken possession of the 
mind both of Americans and of Englishmen. * * * ' Let 
it not be grievous unto you,' was the consolation of- 
fered from England to the Pilgrim Fathers, ' that you 
have been instruments to break the ice for others. 
The honor shall be yours to the world's end, for the 
memory of this action shall never die. ' " 

But we should also remember the warning of Dean 
Stanley, that these great predictions do not necessarily 
carry with them their fulfillment. ' ' Other predictions 
more sacred have failed of their full accomplishment 
because the nations of which they were spoken knew 
not the time of their visitation, and heard the Divine 
Call with closed ears and hardened hearts." 

This is the Day of our Visitation, and a call has 
come to the American people as clear and compelling 



108 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

as the call which summoned Abraham from his country 
and his father's house. If, in this crisis of our destiny, 
we are misled by the counsels of a low prudence, we 
shall repent once, and repent always. Never were 
those fine lines of James Russell Lowell, on the "Pres- 
ent Crisis, ' ' of greater import than today. 

"Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men 
behind their time? 
Turns those tracks towards Past or Future, 
That make Plymouth Rock sublime? 
But we make their truth our falsehood, when our tender 

spirits flee 
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them 
across the sea." 

The prows of the Mayflower and the Arbella, of the 
Sea Venture and Godspeed, of the Ark and the Dove, 
turned not bacljw^ard, but forward, as they ploughed 
their way through unpathed waters to the shores of 
the wild New "World. One hundred and fifty years 
later, the men of Connecticut, speeding to the fray, 
with the same high confidence, carried before them 
banners, inscribed in golden letters — "God who 
brought over the fathers will sustain the sons. ' ' 

Let us never doubt that while America treads the 
paths of honor and true greatness in the fulfillment of 
her destiny, she will be sustained and exalted among 
the nations, for this blessed land comes not to destroy 
but to fulfill. Vast wealth and power bring increased 
duties and responsibilities to the nation as to the indi- 
vidual. TTnless directed to noble ends, we may well 
pray, like Edward Everett Hale, "Deliver us, Lord, 



SHAKESPEAEE AND THE FOUNDERS OF LIBERTY 109 

from our terrible prosperity. ' ' Upon no one does re- 
sponsibility for the future rest more heavily than upon 
the women of America. Perhaps, like Queen Esther, 
they have been called to the kingdom for such a time 
as this. 

George Washington had a noble mind, a progres- 
sive mind. Were he on earth today, who can doubt 
that he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with 
Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson and Clemenceau 
in their heroic efforts to safeguard the peace and well 
being of mankind ? 

The Voice that called our fathers is calling us. 
With high hearts not unworthy of their sons and 
daughters, let us follow the new light and new truth 
of our day as faithfully as they followed the new light 
and new truth revealed to them in their day. Whith- 
ersoever it may lead us, let us Follow the Gleam. 

"New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes ancient good 
uncouth. 

They must upward still and onward, who would keep 
abreast of Truth. 

Lo! before us gleam her campfires, we ourselves must 
Pilgrims be, 

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the 
desperate winter sea, 

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood- 
rusted key." 



THE PILGRIM QUALITY 



To Americans America is something more than a promise 
and an expectation. It has a past and traditions of its own. 
A descent from men who sacrificed everything and came 
hither, not to better their fortunes, but to plant their idea 
in a virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There was 
never colony save this that went forth, not to seek gold, 
but God. 

James Russell Lowell. 

Spirituality was of the essence of New England from 
its birth, and underlies its historic democracy as the things 
of eternity underlie the things of time. 

Oeorge E. Woodberry. 



THE PILGRIM QUALITY 

The Pilgrim was a Puritan, but the Puritan was 
not a Pilgrim. Holding the tenets of the Puritan 
faith, the Pilgrim went farther, separating from the 
Church of England as well as from its corruptions, 
and thus reverting to the simplicity of the Apostolic 
Church. The long sojourn in Holland and the experi- 
ences of exiles in a foreign land had given them a 
broader outlook on life and a wider sympathy with 
men outside of their own household of faith. Brew- 
ster and Robinson represented the advanced religious 
thought of their day, but the great foundation quali- 
ties were alike in Pilgrim and Puritan. The life of 
both was based upon reality — to Be, and not Seem. 
As easy to separate mind from spirit, or soul from 
body, as the true New England man from earnestness 
and sincerity. To him it was no mere figure of speech 
that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him 
forever. Every pulpit rang with the doctrine of dis- 
interested benevolence. Fed on such meat it is small 
wonder that the spirit of New England grew so great. 
' ' Search all things and hold fast to that which is 
good," was the first and great commandment; and 
the second was like unto it — ''Be ye steadfast and 



116 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

immovable," an injunction to be obeyed with a fine 
disregard of consequences and with an eye single to 
the praise of God. The essence of Puritanism was the 
idea of self-sacrifice. To die to self and to live again 
unto righteousness, was their being's end and aim. 

The Puritan spirit rested on granite foundations. 
There was an underlying strength in the Puritan 
which made itself felt in the supreme moments of exist- 
ence like a dynamic force. High trust and loyalty were 
as his vital breath, and to lose them was to desecrate 
his life. ' ' From the days of the Pilgrim Fathers down 
to the time when Emerson in rhapsodic flights preached 
the ethical idealism of Fichte, and Longfellow wrote 
the Psalm of Life, the old Puritan spirit remained pre- 
dominant." It was no blind chance which led to the 
wonderful literary outburst in New England two cen- 
turies later. The abundant life does not spring up in 
the barren soil of commercialism, and the materialistic 
spirit is fatal to poetry and the higher imagination. 
The passion for theology was but a stage of the New 
England Pilgrim's Progress. He was a practical 
idealist with his eye fixed upon the Eternal, and sooner 
or later his love of excellence would lead him to all 
forms of the true, the beautiful, and the good. 

Rev. John Robinson wisely foresaw that, once sep- 
arated by the ocean from the Old Country, all differ- 
ences would fade away, leaving Pilgrim and Puritan 
in full accord in all the essentials of faith and practice. 
And so it proved. The Congregational Church estab- 
lished by the Pilgrim Fathers superseded all others in 



THE PILGRIM QUALITY 117 

New England for many generations. In many impor- 
tant respects the Pilgrims were the fore-runners of 
modern America. The greater wealth and numerical 
strength of the Bay Colony has sometimes overshad- 
owed the real greatness of Plymouth. On this subject 
William Griffis says : 

' ' The Pilgrim republic was a true prototype of the 
United States of American, cosmopolitan, tolerant, 
Christian. Here were people of at least seven nation- 
alities, of varying degrees of character, culture, and 
social standing, and of different creeds and ideas of 
government in church and state. Yet into this colony 
men of all sects and no sect were received if they were 
willing to obey the laws and usages. With an intense 
and positive faith, the Pilgrims made no form of words 
to bind the conscience. They welcomed to their church 
fellowship all who made Jesus Christ their teacher 
and model. * * * The legislation of the Plymouth 
Colony was singularly free from the extremes seen 
in the rest of New England and in the southern Col- 
onies. It was wonderfully like that of the Netherlands, 
where both in government and custom Christianity and 
civilization were then much better illustrated. On the 
statute books of Plymouth there were fewer capital 
crimes named than in any other colonies north or south 
of New York and Pennsylvania. The Plymouth law 
against the Quakers was passed late in their history 
and was never enforced. The spirit of the Pilgrims 
had been chastened by their persecutions, sufferings, 
and exile and by dwelling in a tolerant republic, which 
was then the leader among nations." 



118 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

Neither does the incoming tide of European immi- 
gration bear any marked resemblance to the coming 
of Pilgrim or Puritan, who, unlike the modern immi- 
grant, were not attracted to the New World by the 
lure of material gain. The Pilgrim leaders at least 
might have spent their days in ease and dignity had 
they chosen to acquiesce in the religious usages and 
abuses of the realm. The poverty of English refugees, 
like that of the Huguenots, had no relation to their 
status as individuals. 

Now and then some modern writer attempts to 
make merry with the idea of the Pilgrim or Puritan 
in society. In a modern fashionable assembly it would 
not be easy to find men of such scholarship, dignity 
of bearing, and high standards of life and conduct, 
as the leaders of the Mayflower and the Arbella. Qual- 
ity not quantity was their watchword, and the com- 
pass by which they steered. Like Arthur's best, they 
had learned from their varied experiences, 

"High thoughts, and honorable words, 
And love of truth, and all that makes a man." 

The Knighthood of the Middle Ages was an illu- 
stration of the power of the ideal. Its outward ro- 
mance and chivalry were but the visible sign of an 
inward and spiritual grace. The true glory of knight- 
hood was purely a spiritual quality, an ideal which 
hovered above each knightly soul like the pillar of 
cloud and of fire. The finest tribute which could be 
paid a noble knight was to say of him that he was 
* ' Ever plain, faithful, and true. ' ' "When we consider 



THE PILGRIM QUALITY 119 

the kindness and humanity to friend and foe alike, 
the hospitality even to enemies, the leniency towards 
those who sought to injure their dearest interests, 
their readiness to succor the most ungrateful, coupled 
with an invincible courage in matters of conscience, 
one feels that in everything which made knighthood 
truly noble the Pilgrim was his peer. No Red Cross 
Knight ever rode on nobler quest than Miles Standish 
and his handful of Invincibles marching to the rescue 
of the Weymouth settlers. No stranger to the ameni- 
ties of courts and kings, Elder Brewster possessed 
qualities of mind and heart which would have digni- 
fied Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. Truly 
does Charles Kingsley declare that we are befooled 
by names — "Call him Crusader instead of Puritan 
and he seems at once as complete a knight-errant as 
ever watched and prayed, ere putting on his spurs, 
in fantastic Gothic chapel, beneath 'storied windows 
richly dight.' " 

The Pilgrim leaders were English gentlemen and 
scholars, like the men of Massachusetts Bay. Senator 
Hoar, a Puritan of the Puritans, says: "The Win- 
throps were Christian gentlemen, fit for the compan- 
ionship of Bradford and Brewster, and there can be 
no higher praise. There is surely no statelier or loftier 
presence in human history than the Pilgrims of Plym- 
outh. What belongs to a high behavior, to a simple, 
severe, but delicate taste in dress, in architecture, in 
house-furnishings, in the decoration and adornment 
of daily life, they discerned with unerring taste. * * * 



120 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

The dress of the Puritan is now the dress of all gentle- 
men in Europe. The architects of our dwellings are 
studying the secret of his simple and noble architec- 
ture. The serious dignity of demeanor which marked 
the intercourse of Bradford and Brewster is a pattern 
for imitation of any Ambassador, though he represent 
seventy million freemen at whatever court, or before 
whatever Sovereign he may stand. When Bradford 
and Brewster, and Carver, and Robinson, and Miles 
Standish, and Richard Warren, and Edward Winslow, 
and Samuel Fuller were taking counsel together in 
Leyden, they could have set a pattern of stately dig- 
nity to any society on earth. Leyden street in Plym- 
outh, with its cluster of seven humble dwellings, wit- 
nessed a high behavior to which there could not be 
found a parallel in any court in Europe. There was 
no employment so homely or menial that it could de- 
base the simple dignity of these men, a dignity born 
of daily spiritual communion with heavenly contem- 
plations, of constant meditating on the things which 
concern eternal life, and the things which concern the 
foundation of empire. It was like an encampment of 
a company of crusaders on their journey to the Holy 
City, where every companion was a prince or a noble ! ' ' 

Nor was the mark of the high calling absent in the 
generation that succeeded the Pilgrims. It has been 
well said that the fathers must have been of rare moral 
and spiritual fibre who could educate and prepare for 
the duties and responsibilities of a noble life such men 
as Thomas Cushman, ' ' that precious servant of God, ' ' 



THE PILGRIM QUALITY 121 

who sleeps on Burial Hill, and who succeeded William 
Brewster as elder of the Pilgrim Church; or Major 
Bradford, the son of the Governor, who dignified the 
office of Deputy Governor ; or Nathaniel Morton, who 
filled with distinction the place of secretary and his- 
torian of the Old Colony ; or Josiah Winslow, who was 
the colonial Governor, and afterwards the Commander 
of the forces of the United Colonies of Plymouth, 
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven in King 
Phillip 's war ! Verily, the tree is known by its fruit ! 
Apropos to this subject is the story told by Thacher 
in his history of Plymouth, and by Goodwin in ' ' The 
Pilgrim Republic," of the adoption and rearing of 
Thomas Faunce the last ruling elder of the Pilgrim 
Church. He was the son of John Faunce and Patience 
Morton, the father dying in 1654, At the head of his 
grave during his burial stood a pitiful group of little 
orphans left in poverty; but Captain Thomas South- 
worth, a very prominent man in civil affairs, taking 
by the hand Thomas, an eight year old boy, led him 
to his own home and reared him with fatherly affec- 
tion, and transmitting that which he had received 
from his step-father, Governor Bradford, gave the 
orphan a good education, secular and religious. When 
another generation gathered reverently around El- 
der Faunce, the connecting link between two centuries, 
he forgot not to tell the story of his benefactor, and 
to declare that for this training and education he had 
"reason to bless God to all eternity." The orphan 
whom Captain Southworth had fitted for whatever 
station might await him, became the last ruling elder 



122 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

known in Plymouth. This office was one of great con- 
sideration, the elder being regarded as the virtual 
representative of the church, and equal to the pastor. 
On February 27, 1745, Elder Thomas Faunce, revered 
of all, passed away at the age ninety-nine years, and 
was laid to rest on Burial Hill. His benefactor. Cap- 
tain Southworth, had passed away many years before, 
and of him the record says : ' ' He was a very Godly 
man ; and he lived and died full of faith and comfort, 
being much lamented by all of all sorts, sects, and con- 
ditions of people." 

Such were the men who guided the destinies of 
Plymouth Colony. 



AN OLX> COLONY PILGRIMAGE 



AN OLD COLONY PILGRIMAGE 

Everywhere in the New England country the new 
and the old are commingled. Even the names of the 
pleasure boats are suggestive of the past — the Betty 
Alden, the Elder Brewster, the Miles Standish, while 
the streets of quaint Plymouth and quainter Province- 
town are named for the Pilgrim leaders. It is indeed 
the Pilgrims' Land! The dwellers in modern Plym- 
outh have not the mind of St. Ogg's, which George 
Eliot says ' ' did not look before nor after, and inherited 
a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for 
the spirits that walked the streets. ' ' On the contrary, 
the Pilgrim town is keenly alive to its glorious past. 
It is a busy place, prosperous, enterprising, but its 
native sons prize above all else the story of the Fath- 
ers, and every heirloom and tradition of those early 
days is sacredly cherished. Plymouth is what one 
would wish it to be, a community which values highly 
all that has come dow*n to it through the centuries, 
yet presses on unweariedly towards what is best in the 
life of today. A town to be venerated by every patri- 
otic American, and by all who love freedom of what- 
ever name or race. 

The prospect from Burial Hill is unrivaled, and 



126 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

we wandered about among old gravestones and monu- 
ments with names written thereon famous in history 
and song and story. Those charming tales, ' ' A Name- 
less Nobleman ' ' and ' ' Dr. LeBaron 's Daughters, ' ' had 
long been dear to our hearts, and we copied inscrip- 
tions from old LeBaron tombstones, then paused at 
the grave of Thomas Cushman, ''that precious ser- 
vant of God" dying in 1691 at the age of 84, and who, 
for forty years was the ruling elder of Plymouth 
Church, following faithfully in the footsteps of saintly, 
scholarly Elder Brewster. The wife of El^er Cush- 
man, daughter of Mr. Isaac Allerton, died in 1699, 
aged 90, the last of the Mayflower company. The 
large monument to Grovernor Bradford was erected by 
his descendants, and the Latin inscription freely ren- 
dered means, ' ' Let not the sons basely relinquish what 
the Fathers with difficulty attained. ' ' 

On Burial Hill those married lovers, James and 
Mercy Otis Warren, rest side by side. Theirs were 
singularly benign and gracious lives, still aglow at 
fourscore years with unabated zeal for the public good, 
and for the things of the mind and the things of the 
soul. Not far away is their old home, where the fires 
of domestic affection burned brightly through all the 
troublous years of the Revolution and onward to a 
late old age. Their fine gambrel-roofed house, built 
in 1730 by General John Winslow, who expelled the 
unhappy Acadians from Nova Scotia, became the prop- 
erty of his sister Penelope Winslow, and in time the 
home of her son General Warren of Revolutionary 
fame. In his day it was a spacious place surrounded 



AN OLD COLONY PILGRIMAGE 127 

by trees and gardens, but now fallen from its high 
estate it stands close to the sidewalk and is devoted 
to business uses. Would that this historic house might 
be restored and preserved as a memorial of the brave 
days of old ! The other "Winslow mansion, a charming 
place overlooking Plymouth Rock, was the birthplace 
of Emerson's wife. In its parlor they were married 
in the autumn of 1835, driving in a chaise to historic 
Concord, which Emerson's genius was to convert into 
a Mecca for all the world. 

In Plymouth may be seen the meerstead upon which 
Elder Brewster built his first home in the wilderness. 
Still bubbling up sweet and clear is the Brewster 
Spring, with a tablet bearing the inscription : 

"This noted Spring 
In on the Lot of Land 
Owned — Built upon by 
Elder Brewster, 1621. 
And is the Original 
Elder Brewster Spring." 

For many years this deliciously cold spring was 
marked by a fountain of rough stone with the quaint 
inscription : 

"Drink here and quench your thirst, 
From this spring Pilgrims drank first." 

We slaked our thirst at the little Pilgrim Spring, 
and, like those hardy souls who set out that lowering 
November day in 1620 to explore the Cape Cod sand 
hills, we "drank New England water, with as much 
delight as ever we drank drinke in all our lives. ' ' 



128 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

To a student of the past Pilgrim Hall is rich in 
memories. The old chairs of Elder Brewster and Gov- 
ernor Carver, and various articles belonging to Miles 
Standish and the Winslows carry us back to the dawn 
of our history. Carefully preserved is the sampler 
worked by Lorea Standish, the one ewe lamb of the 
valiant Captain, for so many years the Sword and 
Shield of Plymouth Colony. The swords of Brewster 
and Standish and Benjamin Church, the famous In- 
dian fighter, all speak of days gone by. 

In spite of the rain, a boy was hired to drive to 
Morton Park and Billington Sea, first descried in 1621 
by a young ne 'er-do-well who climbed a tree to gratify 
his restless desire to be doing something, and beheld 
afar off that beautiful body of water, one of the many 
jewels on the bosom of New England. Except Walden 
Pond, we saw nothing so much like the primeval con- 
ditions of the Pilgrim and Puritan day as this lovely, 
lonely spot. Plymouth Woods must look much as they 
did in the time of our forefathers, comprising thou- 
sands of acres and little ponds full of fish, all of which 
form a retreat infinitely restful and delightsome to the 
lover of Nature. 

Encompassed by the ocean and the wilderness 
there must have been a certain loneliness in the life of 
the New England colonists, but less so than in that of 
pioneers on wide western prairies. Long since the poet 
sang of the pleasures of the pathless woods and the 
raptures of the lonely shore. It means a great deal to 
spend one's days in the presence of great natural ob- 



AN OLD COLONY PILGRIMAGE 129 

jects, eternal and unchangeable. The most prosaic 
life is brightened by the pageant unrolled before it 
daily, and is moulded unconsciously by the poetry of 
the mountains and the primeval forests. In his charm- 
ing story, "When Wilderness Was King," Randall 
Parrish says : "I think it must be in the blood of all 
of New England birth to love the sea. They may 
never have seen it, nor even heard its wild, stern 
music; yet the fascination of great waters is part of 
their heritage." Through all the literature of New 
England is heard the sound of the sea, and in its peo- 
ple there is a congenital attachment to mighty waters, 
bred in them centuries before in their island home. 
This inborn craving for the ocean beats and throbs 
like a life-pulse in every lineal descendant of New 
England soil. The strength of the hills is his also, in- 
terwoven with every fibre of his being, and long years 
spent in level inland countries, only make him more 
deeply sensible of the charm of New England, in which 
there is still so much to remind him of the heroic past. 
Acres upon acres of Plymouth woods, dotted with 
beautiful little lakes or ponds shining like gems of 
purest ray upon the bosom of the wilderness, may still 
be seen in the Old Colony as in the days of the Fathers. 
Today, as in centuries gone by, 

"Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring 
ocean 
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of 
the forest." 



THE SPELL OF NEW ENGLAND 



THE SPELL OF NEW ENGLAND 

Life in every form is precious. The homeliest ex- 
perience on Nebraska and Dakota farms deserves to 
have its chronicler, for within the four walls of a rude 
cabin on Western prairies may be found all the tragedy 
and pathos of human existence. But in studying the va- 
rious phases of American pioneer life one finds nothing 
more attractive than early New England. Its stories 
and legends have a peculiar fascination. Beautiful 
beliefs and ideals have power yesterday, today and 
forever, to irradiate and transfigure the hardest earth- 
ly conditions ; and the sordid, dreary details incident 
to pioneer life were lost to sight in the presence of the 
grand ideal which traveled before these children of the 
promise like the pillar of cloud and of fire. 

From the earliest period many of the colonists 
were scholars and thinkers. There were men and wo- 
men in the wilds of New England whose dignity of 
character and fine intelligence would have graced a 
palace. With all its hard practicality, it was always 
a life of books and ideas, of ideals, too, so fine and ele- 
vated that as Richard Salter Storrs says, "Their eth- 



134 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

ereal splendor arched above the rude life in the wilder- 
ness, turning darkness to day in the dreariest life, and 
lighting the hills and bathing the sandy or rocky 
shores as in the uprising of the immortal morning." 
Perhaps intense spirituality and intellectual vigor 
were never more perfectly combined with common 
sense and the practical management of affairs. These 
wise old forefathers and foremothers of America were 
practical idealists, and with keen vision and sure hand 
they laid strong and deep the foundations of many 
generations. 

In what has been well designated as the heroic 
period of New England, there was a dignified sim- 
plicity and old world quaintness which appeals more 
powerfully to the finer imaginations of men than the 
pomp of courts and kings. Its plain living and high 
thinking set against an exquisite background of pri- 
meval woods and waters, belonged to the great heart 
of nature, and in its conceptions and aspirations it 
touched the stars. Nowhere have men ever solved 
better what Philip Gilbert Hamerton justly calls "the 
great problem of human life, the reconciliation of pov- 
erty and the soul." Divorced from the superficial 
and the trivial, and intent upon eternal verities, it was 
the ideal life which Wordsworth and Emerson sighed 
for; the life whose subtle charm has found fitting 
words of appreciation from Whittier, the dear old 
Quaker poet : 



THE SPELL OF NEW ENGLAND 135 

"Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual life of old. 
Inward, grand with awe and reverence; outward, mean 

and coarse and cold: 
Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and vulgar clay. 
Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of hodden gray. 

Not in vain the ancient fiction in whose moral lives the 

youth 
And the fitness and the freshness of an undecaying truth." 



IN THE TRACKS OF OUR FOREFATHERS 



IN THE TRACKS OF OUR FOREFATHERS 

With the eyes of the world turning towards Plym- 
outh Rock as to a shrine, it behooves us to consider 
well the inward significance of the Pilgrim celebration 
now impending. Both in jest and earnest it is some- 
times said of ancestral societies that the best part of 
them is underground ; and the reproach is merited 
when such organizations build and garnish the sepul- 
chres of their fathers, but continue blind and deaf to 
the great problems of the living Present. To be wildly 
enthusiastic over Bunker Hill and Lexington, yet fail 
to lift a voice in defense of issues fully as vital to the 
race as Saratoga or Yorktown, is to be somewhat akin, 
mentally and spiritually to the ancestral fowl so hu- 
morously described by Hawthorne in "The House of 
Seven Gables. ' ' 

In his "Message of Puritanism For This Time" — 
and for all time — Edwin D. i\Iead has truly said : 

' ' No man is so dreary, no man is so superficial, none 
so false, as the man, and his name is legion, Avhose 
carefully cultivated relation to the Puritan is simply 
a historical relation, simply a piece of antiquarianism ; 
whose interest, I say, is simply this, and who cannot 
be counted on for help in any cause or any place in 



140 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

which the spirit of the Puritan still finds expression, 
save only at Forefathers ' Day dinners, beginning with 
a course of three grains of corn, but hastening quickly 
to turtle and quail. * * * The only real use in going 
back to the Pilgrim and Puritan Fathers is to be helped 
more vitally into the present. It is to catch the spirit 
of our time that was in them for their time, to be made 
like them 'men of present valor,' dealing practically 
and stalwartly with the new occasion and new duty 
of today, instead of with the things of yesterday. ' ' 

From the beginnings of our history the sense of a 
vast and mysterious future brooded over the colonial 
life of New England. Nor had the Vision faded a 
century and a half later, when John Adams wrote: 
"I always consider the settlement of America with 
reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene 
and design in Providence for the illumination of the 
ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of 
mankind all over the earth." With this belief in the 
mission of America was coupled a high consciousness 
of Divine aid and protection. In 1776, the men of 
Connecticut speeding to the fray, carried before them 
banners inscribed in golden letters, ' ' God who brought 
over the fathers will sustain the sons. ' ' 

The Return of the Mayflower, in 1917, aroused in 
the civilized world a deeper realization of the mighty 
import of 1620 and 1776, and begot in every true 
American heart a keener sense of the responsibility 
resting upon this great people to carry on. The United 
States is rightfully a leader, not a backslider, in all 



IN THE TRACKS OF OUR FOREFATHERS 141 

the great forward movements of the human race. The 
rejection of the League of Nations would be another 
of the Great Denials of history, perpetrated in every 
age by men of reactionary minds, standing with their 
backs to the future and to the light. 

The spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers was altruistic. 
No selfish and separate benefit, but the good of the 
whole was the end they sought. Were they on earth 
today they would not be dwelling in the dead past, but 
standing shoulder to shoulder with those who are 
struggling to safeguard the freedom and peaceful 
progress of mankind. 

"Not for their hearts and homes alone, 

But for the world their work was done, 
On all the winds their thought has flown 
Through all the circuits of the sun." 

"With the same high spirit and purpose which 

marked the early settlement of this country, let us, 

as becomes their sons and daughters, follow the new 

light and truth now dawning upon the world, for 

"God fulfils Himself in many ways." 

Bringing no vain oblations, but dedicated in spirit 

and in truth to the grand traditions and ideals of the 

Past and the Future, this great people may approach 

the tombs of its forefathers in a fashion worthy of its 

origin and its history. Hand joined in hand with 

English-speaking peoples, and loyally co-operating 

with all freedom-loving nations throughout the world, 

the land of the Pilgrim and the Cavalier, of George 

Washington and Abraham Lincoln will march forward 

to a future of yet unimagined greatness — 

"I do not know beneath what skies 
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; 
I only know it shall be high, 
I only know it shall be great." 



OUR PILGRIM INHERITANCE 



OUR PILGRIM INHERITANCE 

With three hundred years of New England ances- 
try behind me, it was my misfortune to be born far 
away from the land of my forefathers. But, if, as 
Winthrop Packard affirms. New England is not so 
much a place as a state of mind, then I may truly be 
said to have lived and moved and had my being in 
that favored spot and not elsewhere. Lucy Larcom 
somewhere says that ''people as well as plants have 
their habitat — the place where they belong, and where 
they find their happiest, because their most natural 
life." 

Since childhood I have felt that my mental and 
spiritual habitat is New England, an impression which 
has deepened with years and acquaintance with that 
favored spot. The broad prairies of the West, be- 
decked with wild roses and sweet-williams, or heaped 
high with winter snows, have a beauty all their own; 
but nothing can assuage the instinctive longing for a 
land of hills and valleys and mountains and ocean, 
with inspiring traditions of a historic and literary past. 
New England has a peculiar and distinctive charm 
which begets the most loyal and devoted attachment 



146 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

in its sons and daughters, not for a brief period, but 
for a lifetime. 

The visitor to New England spends much of his 
time seeking ancient landmarks under modern condi- 
tions, but too often they can only be spiritually dis- 
cerned. The historic North End of Boston literally 
swarms with foreigners who know not Winthrop and 
Eliot and the Mathers. One 's first emotion is that of 
rebellion at this irruption of aliens into a region con- 
secrated to noble memories, but the thought of Mary 
Antin and her "Promised Land" reconciles one, in 
some measure, to the inevitable. 

The statue of Samuel Adams, the torchbearer of 
the Revolution, is a fitting symbol of early New Eng- 
land. The strong resolved figure, standing like a sen- 
tinel through storm and sunshine, visibly embodies the 
hereditary character and noble principles of the Pil- 
grim and Puritan commonwealths. One fancies that 
the old hero might fall from his pedestal should his 
"dear New England" prove recreant to the best tra- 
ditions of its name and race. States and cities, like 
individuals, long retain the traces of their origin, and 
in spite of foreign immigration and modern commer- 
cialism, Massachusetts is filled with fragrant memories 
of heroic days and ways. 

But all its beauty of sea and shore and all its wealth 
of historic and literary association are only the body 
of New England — the soul of it is to be sought in those 
moral and spiritual qualities which alone constitute 
the real greatness of the individual or of the Com- 



OUR PILGRIM INHERITANCE 147 

monwealth. First and foremost of these distinguish- 
ing characteristics of old New England was Character 
— "First Character, and second Character, and ever- 
more Character." High-minded men were the prod- 
uct which early New England esteemed far above sil- 
ver and gold or any material possession whatsoever. 
' ' As the Greeks loved beauty, old New England loved 
right; and high thought and beliefs were to them what 
stocks and bonds are to their descendants." 

No body of men ever better appreciated the spir- 
itual values of life. Shorn of these existence was a 
mockery, and man but gilded loam or painted clay. 
"With Emerson yet afar off, there were multitudes of 
plain men and women scattered among the hills and 
valleys of New England who were none the less "pious 
aspirants to be noble clay, plastic under the Almighty 
effort." 

New England still produces men who stand for all 
that is best in New England and in America, and in 
whom is happily blended the high fashion of early New 
England with the width and liberality of today. The 
city of the Puritans and the whole New England coun- 
try are eloquent with reminders of men and women 
who have wrought mightily for the glory of God and 
the well-being of their race. Except Mount Vernon, 
there is no place in America so alive with gracious, 
uplifting influences as Boston town and its vicinity. 

Nor is New England's mission accomplished. In 
these troublous days when the principles of the found- 
ers are threatened with extinction by the power of 



148 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

wealth and political corruption, men of the staunch 
Mayflower breed are needed as of yore to separate 
with its stern Puritan besom the chaff from the wheat. 
Long ago Emerson said : "In every age of the world 
there has been a leading nation, one of a more gen- 
erous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing 
to stand for the interests of general justice and human- 
ity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the 
moment, chimerical and fantastic." There is a wise 
conservatism, which honoring whatever is noblest in 
the past, yet keeps its windows open to the sunrising. 

The best of the New England stock has ever been 
characterized by forward looking minds and a keen 
desire to make tomorrow better than today. To be 
a New Englander is to have a passion for realizing 
one's ideals, and wherever he goes he labors untiring- 
ly to graft the ancestral virtues upon the cruder and 
more material conditions of other communities. The 
Pilgrim and Puritan spirit has not fled ! Its accents 
may be heard in the speech of those reared under the 
fine influences of old New England, and in whom the 
hereditary principles and ideals still live and burn. 
The future greatness of America depends, not upon 
material possessions, but upon the souls of the men 
who inhabit it. Quality, not quantity is the watch- 
word ; and the sons will not basely relinquish that noble 
democracy, reaching up to the highest and down to the 
lowest, which the fathers with so much difficulty at- 
tained. Once a New Englander, always a New Eng- 
lander; and a common ancestry, a common enthusi- 



OUR PmGRIM INHERITANCE 149 

asm for the great memories and traditions of the past, 
is a tie that binds. 

The true son of New England has what Bliss Perry- 
calls "conservatism in his blood, and radicalism in his 
brains" — keeping fast hold of all that is best in the 
past, yet eagerly reaching out towards new light and 
new truth to suit the newer day. Truly understood, 
to be progressive is to be true to the spirit of the 
Fathers. 

The pedigree of the mind is more than the pedigree 
of the body, and it is the spirit and purpose which 
counts in us, even as it did in our fathers. "Not to 
do in our day what our fathers did long ago," says 
Phillips Brooks, "but to live as truly up to our light 
as our fathers lived up to theirs — that is what it is to 
be worthy of our fathers." Only as we realize our 
o\^^l high duty and responsibility shall we be able to 
bequeath to posterity the noble inheritance we have 
ourselves received. 

A famous French statesman once asked James 
Russell Lowell how long this republic could endure, 
and he replied, "So long as America is true to the 
principles of her founders. " Nothing but great ideals 
heroically contended for can hold our beloved country 
on its upward way. 

In all that relates to our political, social, and indus- 
trial relations we stand at the parting of the ways, 
and it is ours to determine whether America shall con- 
tinue worthy of her great inheritance or become deaf 



ISO OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

and dead to the higher voices. The United States can 
no more escape her manifest destiny as a world power 
than she can evade the laws which govern the universe. 

Three hundred years ago, in their poor cottages in 
the wilderness, our fathers dimly foresaw that America 
was predestined to exercise a vast and beneficent influ- 
ence upon the fortunes of mankind. They saw it and 
were glad. To add somewhat to the well-being of 
mankind, and to leave this world better than they 
found it, was the high ambition of the founders and 
makers of America. 

God be with us, as He was with our fathers ! 



PART SECOND 
A PILGRIM ROSARY 



ELDER BREWSTER'S MESSAGE. 

Extracts from Webster's speech at the Pilgrim Festival, 
New York, 1850: 

' ' Gentlemen : There was, in ancient times, a ship 
that carried Jason to the acquisition of the Golden 
Fleece. There was a flagship at the battle of Actium 
which made Augustus Caesar master of the world. In 
modern times there have been flagships which have 
carried Hawke, and Howe, and Nelson, of the other 
continent, and Hull, and Decatur, and Stewart of this, 
to triumph. What are they all, in the chance of re- 
membrance among men, to that little bark, the May- 
flower, which reached these shores in 1620? Yes, 
brethren, that Mayflower was a flower destined to be 
of perpetual bloom ! Its verdure will stand the sultry 
blasts of Summer and the chilling winds of Autumn. 
It will defy Winter, It will defy all climate and all 
time, and will continue to spread its petals to the 
world, and to exhale an everlasting odor and fragrance 
to the last syllable of recorded time. " * * * 

"Gentlemen, brethren of New England, whom I 
have come some hundreds of miles to meet this night, 
let me present to you one of the most distinguished 
of those personages who came hither on the deck of 



154 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

the Mayflower. Let me fancy that I now see Elder 
William Brewster entering the door at the further end 
of this hall ; a tall erect figure, of plain dress, with a 
respectful bow, mild and cheerful, but of no merri- 
ment that reaches beyond a smile. Let me suppose 
that his image stood now before us, or that it was 
looking in upon this assembly. ' Are ye, ' he would say, 
with a voice of exultation, and yet softened with mel- 
ancholy, ' are ye our children ? Does this scene of re- 
finement, of elegance, of riches, of luxury, does all this 
come from our labors? Is this magnificent city, the 
like of which we never saw nor heard of on either con- 
tinent, is this but an offshoot from Plymouth Rock? 

"Quis jam locus * * * * 

Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?" 

Is this one part of the great reward for which my 
brethren and myself endured lives of toil and of hard- 
ship? We had faith and hope. God granted us the 
spirit to look forward, and we did look forward. But 
this scene we never anticipated. Our hopes were on 
another life. Of earthly gratifications we tasted little ; 
for human honors we had little expectation. Our 
bones lie on the hill in Plymouth churchyard, obscure, 
unmarked, secreted, to preserve our graves from the 
knowledge of savage foes. No stone tells where we lie. 
And yet, let me say to you who are our descendants, 
who possess this glorious country and all it contains, 
who enjoy this hour of prosperity and the thousand 
blessings showered upon it by the God of your fathers, 
we envy you not, we reproach you not. Be rich, be 



ELDER Brewster's message 155 

prosperous, be enlightened, * * * if such be your allot- 
ment on earth; but live, also, always to God and to 
duty. Spread yourselves and your children over the 
continent, accomplish the whole of your great destiny, 
and if it be that through the whole you carry Puritan 
hearts with you, if you still cherish an undying love 
of civil and religious liberty, and mean to enjoy them 
yourselves, and are willing to shed your heart's blood 
to transmit them to your posterity, then will you be 
worthy descendants of Carver, and AUerton, and 
Bradford, and the rest of those who landed from 
stormy seas on the Rock of Plymouth. ' ' 



ELDER BREWSTER'S PROPHECY^ 

In the time of their greatest mortality, two or three 
died in a day. Faithful, patient, noble-hearted women, 
weakened by deprivations and suffering, some in the 
bloom of life, yielded to the fatal maladies, and often 
in the triumphs of faith. * * * And what must have 
been the Elder's feelings as he beheld the sufferings 
and sad diminishing of his little flock ? What the deep 
workings of thought, trials of faith, and continued 
purpose of himself and companions, during this fear- 
ful period. I can seem to see, as that hard and dark 
season was passing away, a diminished procession of 
these Pilgrims following another, dearly loved and 
newly dead, to that bank of graves, and pausing sadly 
there before they shall turn away to see that face no 
more. In full view from that spot the Mayflower is 
still riding at anchor, but soon to sail to their father- 
land, and leave them alone, the living and the dead, 
to the weal or woe of their new home. The afflicted 
and bereaved gather around their venerated Elder, 
dearer to them now than ever. They listen to his 
voice, subdued yet animated by firm faith and hope, 
whilst, in tones of cheerful trust that reach hearts as 

'Rufus Choate: The Age of the Pilgrims. 



158 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

noble as his own, he gives utterance to his struggling 
emotions: "Man is altogether vanity. He passeth 
away as a shadow. His only true home is Heaven. 
Strangers and pilgrims are we on the earth. Still 
this spot on w^hich we stand, this line of shore, yea, 
this whole land grows dearer daily, were it only for 
the precious dust which we have committed to its 
bosom. Here, rather than elsewhere, would I sleep 
when my hour shall come, with those who have shared 
in our exceeding labors, and whose burdens are now 
unloosed forever. I would be near them in the last 
day, and have a part in their resurrection. * * * Our 
departed ones are at rest. For some divine purpose 
we yet remain. It is on my mind that the darkest 
of our night is passed ; the morning is at hand. The 
breath of the pleasant southwest is here, and the sing- 
ing of birds. The sore sickness is stayed; somewhat 
more than half our number still remain, and among 
these some of our best and wisest, though others are 
fallen asleep. Cheering is the fact, that among you 
all, the living and the dead, not one, even when dis- 
ease had seized him, and sharp anguish had made his 
heart as a little child's, who desired, yea, who could 
have been persuaded to go back by yonder ship to 
their former homes. Plainly is it God's will that we 
stand or fall here. Our very condition was not un- 
thought of even in Holland. And in our heaviest trials 
has not the Divine Presence been with us? Did not 
His providential hand open for us the way through 
every difficulty? In that bitterest hour of embarka- 
tion, did we not see His bow in the cloud, the bright 



ELDER Brewster's prophecy 159 

bow of promise and hope, whose arch spanned for us 
the broad ocean, and is over us still? Wherefore let 
us stand in our lot. "We believe this movement to be 
from Him. If He prosper us, we shall be the means of 
planting here a Christian colony and a pure church, 
yea, a nation, by which all other nations shall be 
healed. 

Blessed will it be for us, blessed for this land, for 
this vast continent. Nay, from generation to genera- 
tion will the blessing descend. Generations to come 
shall look back to this hour, and these scenes of agon- 
izing trial, this day of small things, and say, ' Here was 
our beginning as a people. These were our fathers. 
Through their trials we inherit our blessings. Their 
faith is our faith ; their hope our hope ; their God our 
God. ' The prospect brightens before me ; it ends not 
on earth ; it enters heaven ! Let us go hence, then, to 
work with our might, that which we have to do. No 
small undertaking is it, that we have in hand. The 
opportunity for working will soon be past, and we 
shall be called to our account, and, if faithful, to our 
reward. ' ' 

Calmly, and with firm faith, they turn from those 
graves; the Mayflower is sent away; and these men 
of stern resolve and high purpose, press onward in 
their incessant imperious labors. 



BREWSTER TABLETS 

The Brewster Tablet. An interesting memorial 
was, in the summer of 1895, erected at Scrooby, Not- 
tinghamsliire, England, by the Pilgrim Society of 
Plymouth, Mass., to mark the site of the English home 
of William Brewster, the founder and the ruling elder 
of the Pilgrim Church of New England. Brewster, 
while in England, was one of the illustrious sufferers 
for conscience's sake, and after his liberation from jail 
he removed to Holland, then to the New World in the 
Mayflower. A transcript of the commemorating tab- 
let, which is affixed to the farmhouse at Scrooby, on 
the site of Brewster's ancient manor-house, is as fol- 
lows: 



This Tablet is erected by the 

Pilgrim Society of Plymouth, 

Massachusetts, United States of 

America, to mark the site of the 

Ancient, manor-house, where lived 

William Brewster. 

From 1588-1608. And where he 

Organized the Pilgrim Church of 

Which he became Ruling Elder, and 

With which, in 1608, he removed to 

Amsterdam, in 1609 to Leyden, and in 

1620 to Plymouth, where he died, 

April 10, 1644. 



162 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

On the 28th of August, 1913, an obelisk was un- 
veiled, which had been erected as a Memorial to the 
Pilgrim fathers, at Southampton, England. Many- 
persons of note, both English and American, were 
present at the imposing ceremonies. One panel sacred 
to the memory of Elder Brewster, bears the following 
inscription : 

In memory of 

William Brewster. 

Born at Scrooby, 1566. 

Educated at Cambridge. 

Special Ambassador to Holland, for Her Gracious 

Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. 

Sailed from this Quay on the good ship 

Mayflower, 1620. 

Signer of the Compact, Elder of Plymouth Colony, 

Founder of the First Free Church in America. 

Chaplain of the first Military Company under 

Miles Standish against the Indians. 

Brilliant in his Scholarship, 

Far-seeing in his Statesmanship, 

Broad-minded, convincing, and eloquent in his Preaching, 

In the words of his beloved friend and 

companion, Governor Bradford, 

"He sweetly departed this life unto a better," 

Plymouth, Massachusetts, April 10, 1644. 

This tablet is given by his Loyal Descendants in America. 



For manhood is the one immortal thing 

Beneath Time's changeful sky, 
And, where it lightened once, from age to age. 
Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage, 

That length of days is knowing when to die. 
James Russell Lowell. 

The great, in affliction, bear a countenance more princely 
than they are wont; for it is the temper of the highest 
hearts, like the palm tree, to strive most upward when it 
is most burdened. 

Sir Philip Sidney. 



ELDER BREWSTER AND GOVERNOR 
BRADFORD 

"In proportion to its numbers," writes Morton 
Dexter, "Plymouth Colony was richly endowed with 
able leaders, and without them it must have failed ut- 
terly and speedily. Chief among them was John Rob- 
inson, who more than any one else, although he re- 
mained in Leyden, gave to it its abiding moral and 
spiritual impulse; Brewster, its original principal, 
wise and experienced, the patron, so to speak, of the 
enterprise ; and Bradford, its thoughtful scholar, care- 
ful historian, and prudent, energetic man of affairs." 

The names of Elder Brewster and Governor Brad- 
ford, ' ' the two main props of Plymouth Colony, ' ' are 
as indissolubly linked as those of David and Jona- 
than. One of the most potent influences in the life 
of the youthful Bradford must have come to him, 
through his acquaintance with the future Elder of the 
Pilgrims. "The lad's chosen friend and companion 
was William Brewster, a man thirty years his senior. 
His influence on Bradford was of the utmost impor- 
tance, not only on account of his piety, but because 
of his great stores of wisdom and experience. Brew- 
ster was a scholar ; but he had seen much of courts and 



166 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

cities, and had studied the world as well as books, 
before he settled down at Scrooby. In his earlier life 
he had been the trusted secretary and friend of Da- 
vison, the Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth. 
* * * Brewster has been with him at Court and 
in foreign lands, had been entrusted mth important 
commissions, and had come into very close touch with 
the mysteries of royalty; for it was Davison who 
signed the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots, 
and lost his office thereby, through Elizabeth 's treach- 
Qj,y # * # Those who speak of Bradford's lack 
of early advantages forget that the constant compan- 
ionship of a man like William Brewster was in itself 
a liberal education.'" 

' ' For almost a decade, or from the hour when Rob- 
inson made his prayer of parting and farewell at 
Delfshaven, to the hour of the settlement of an or- 
dained minister at Plymouth, Brewster was the spirit- 
ual guide of the little flock in the winderness This is 
wliy his name appears only in the most important of 
the business transactions of the colony, and why, 
though his counsel was always in demand and always 
at the service of the chosen authorities, he was never 
advanced to civic leadership. In natural ability, in 
training, and above all, in wide and varied experience 
in affairs, he was one of the most competent men of 
the company to stand at the head in times of financial 
pressure, and when the skies of the future were black 
with clouds. He was, also, not only one of the best, 

'May Alden Ward : Old Colony Days. 



BREWSTER AND BRADFORD 167 

but the best one to have charge of the religious inter- 
ests of the Pilgrims. He had the age, the knowledge, 
the furnishing of books, the spiritual insight, the de- 
vout temper, the loving heart, the irreproachable 
character, the confidence and affection of the people, 
and — a matter of no small consequence — the advan- 
tage of long and close intimacy with the great Pastor 
who had been left behind, to qualify him above all 
others for this service in the things of God and the 
soul. "2 

Through all the years of arduous toil and diffi- 
culty incident to founding Plymouth Plantation, 
Elder Brewster and Governor Bradford went hand in 
hand. It was in the evening of his days, following 
the death of Brewster, that Bradford wrote his price- 
less history. Carried off from the Library in the tower 
of the Old South Church in Boston, by British sol- 
diers during the Revolution, after an absence of one 
hundred and fifty years it was happily restored to 
America through the efforts of Senator Hoar and the 
courtesy of the Bishop of London. With appropriate 
honors it was received, and is preserved under glass 
in the Library of the State House of Boston, a pos- 
session forever to the American people, the Genesis 
and Exodus of their national history. 

"William Bradford, of the Mayflower and Plym- 
outh Rock, deserves the pre-eminence of being called 
the father of American history. We pay to him also 
that homage which we render to those authors who 

^FYederlck A. Noble. 



168 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

even by their writings give to us the impression that, 
admirable as they may be in authorship, behind their 
authorship is something still more admirable — ^their 
own manliness. . . . 

"There is no other document upon New England 
history that can take precedence of this either in time 
or in authority. Governor Bradford wrote of events 
that had passed under his own eye, and that had been 
shaped by his own hand; and he had every qualifica- 
tion of a trustworthy narrator. His mind was placid, 
grave, well-poised; he was a student of many books 
and of many languages; and being thus developed 
both by letters and by experience, he was able to tell 
well the truth of history as it had unfolded itself dur- 
ing his own strenuous and benignant career. , . . 
There is something very impressive in the quiet, sage 
words in which he pictures the conflicts of opinion 
among the Pilgrims over this question of their removal 
to America, their clear, straight view of the perils and 
pains which it would involve, and finally the consid- 
erations that moved them, in spite of all the tre- 
mendous difficulties they foresaw, to make their im- 
mortal attempt. No modern description of these mod- 
est and unconquerable heroes can equal the impres- 
sion made upon us by the reserve and the moral sub- 
limity of the historian 's words : upon almost every 
page of this history there is some quiet trace of the 
lofty motives which conducted them to their great 
enterprise, and of the simple heroism of their thoughts 
in pursuing it. They had undertaken the voyage, 



BREWSTER AND BRADFORD 169 

'for the glory of God, and advancement of the Chris- 
tian faith,' and for the honor of their king and 
country." . . . 

* * Thus are made plain to us the commanding quali- 
ties of the mind and style of our first American his- 
torian — justice, breadth, vigor, dignity, directness, 
and untroubled command of strong and manly speech. 
Evidently he wrote without artistic consciousness or 
ambition. The daily food of his spirit was noble. He 
uttered himself, without effort, like a free man, a 
sage, and a Christian. ' '^ 

The old Greeks were people of one book, and the 
same patriotism and undying love of country inspired 
in them by the Iliad and Odyssey will not be sought in 
vain in the narrative of Bradford. A wise and force- 
ful writer of modem New England says truly : 

"The book that Bradford wrote, as the tales that 
Homer told, will last as long as books are read. Ply- 
mouth may pass, as Troy did, but the story of its he- 
roes will remain. Bradford wrote gravely and simply 
the chronicles of these, and no more, yet the fervent 
faith and sturdy love for fair play, unquenchable in 
the hearts of these men, breathes from every page, a 
fragrance that shall go forth on the winds of the world 
for all time. Bradford's book, which Was our first, 
may well, at the end of time, be rated our greatest. "* 

* ' William Brewster more than any man was entitled 

'Moses Coit Tyler: "History of American Literature." 
♦Winthrop Packard. 



1 70 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

to be called the Founder of the Pilgrim Church. It 
originated in his house at Scrooby, and he sacrificed 
everything for it. ... Of William Brewster it 
has been truly said that until his death in April, 1644, 
his hand was never lifted from Pilgrim history. He 
shaped the counsels of his colleagues, helped to mould 
their policy, safeguarded their liberties, and kept in 
check tendencies towards religious bigotry and op- 
pression. He tolerated differences, but put down 
wrangling and dissension, and promoted to the best of 
his power the strength and purity of public and pri- 
vate life."^ 

' ' Brewster and Bradford, the ^neas and Ascanius 
of our grand Pilgrim Epic — I might better have said, 
the Paul and Timothy, or be it Titus, of our New 
England, Plymouth, Separatist Church — both of them 
laymen, but both of them, by life and word, by pre- 
cept and example, showing forth the great doctrines 
of Christ, their Saviour, with a power and a per- 
suasiveness which might well have been envied by any 
pastor or preacher or lordly prelate of that or any 
other day: Together they braved persecution. To- 
gether they bore the taunts and scoffs of neighbors 
and relatives. Together they embraced exile. To- 
gether they were cast into prison at old Boston in 
Lincolnshire. Together, after a brief separation — for 
Bradford was liberated first on account of his youth — 
they found refuge in Holland. Together they em- 
barked in the Mayflower. Together they were asso- 

"Albert Christopher Addison: The Romantic Story of the 
Mayflower Pilgrims. 



BREWSTER AND BRADFORD 171 

ciated for three and twenty years — for Brewster lived 
in a vigorous old age till 1643 — in establishing and 
ruling the Pilgrim plantation here at New Plymouth. 

' ' For ever honored by their names in New England 
history and in New England hearts ! Alas ! that no 
portrait of either of them is left — if, indeed, in their 
simplicity and modesty, they would ever have allowed 
one to be taken — so that their image, as well as their 
names and their example, might be held up to the 
contemplation of our country and of mankind for 
endless generations. ' '* 

Stars shining out of a sable field in the coat-armor 
of the ancient Brewster family of Sujffolk, England, 
were indeed the fitting emblem of Elder Brewster's 
strangely chequered history. Behind the storms and 
thick darkness ever shone steadfastly the Sun of 
Righteousness. Amid the most adverse conditions the 
sweet and cheerful optimism of the heroic Elder of the 
Mayflower caused the heaviest cloud to "turn its sil- 
ver lining to the light. ' ' 

•Robert C. Wlnthrop: Pilgrim Oration, Dec. 21, 1870. 



PROVINCETOWN MEMORIAL TABLET 

The corner stone of the Provincetown Monument to 
the Pilgrims was laid August 20, 1907. On August 
5, 1910, it was dedicated with imposing ceremonies. 
The inscription on the monument was written by the 
orator of the day, Charles William Eliot, President- 
emeritus of Harvard University : 

ON NOVEMBER 21st, 1620, THE MAYFLOWER, 
CARRYING 102 PASSENGERS, MEN, WOMEN AND 
CHILDREN, CAST ANCHOR IN THIS HARBOR 
67 DAYS FROM PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND. 

ON THE SAME DAY THE 41 ADULT MALES IN THE 
COMPANY HAD SOLEMNLY COVENANTED AND 
COMBINED THEMSELVES TOGETHER "INTO A 
CIVIL BODY POLITICK." 

THIS BODY POLITIC ESTABLISHED AND MAIN- 
TAINED ON THE BLEAK AND BARREN EDGE OF A 
VAST WILDERNESS A STATE WITHOUT A KING OR 
A NOBLE, A CHURCH WITHOUT A BISHOP OF A 
PRIEST, A DEMOCRATIC COMMONWEALTH, THE 
MEMBERS OF WHICH WER,E "STRAIGHTLY TIED TO 
ALL CARE OF EACH OTHER'S GOOD AND OF THE 
WHOLE BY EVERY ONE." 

WITH LONG-SUFFERING DEVOTION AND SOBER 
RESOLUTION THEY ILLUSTRATED FOR THE FIRST 
TIME IN HISTORY THE PRINCIPLES OF CIVIL AND 
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND THE PRACTICES OF A 
GENUINE DEMOCRACY. 

THEREFORE THE REMEMBRANCE OF THEM SHALL 
BE PERPETUAL IN THE VAST REPUBLIC THAT HAS 
INHERITED THEIR IDEALS. 



They intended to go to Virginia, 

But God at the wheel said, "No! 
The hundred that I have chosen 

To the cold, white North shall go. 
I will temper them there as by fire, 

I will try them a hundred fold, 
I will shake them with all its tempests, 

I will steady them with its cold." 

So these men from the English meadows 

By the pitiless Plymouth Bay, 
Learned well the worth of their Freedom, 

By the price they had to pay. 
But out of the fires of aflBiction, 

The tumult and struggle of wars, 
They brought forth her glorious banner, 

Its azure all shining with stars. 

The Hundred has grown to a nation, 

The wilderness blooms like the rose. 
And all through the South and the West 

Go the men of the ice and the snows. 
But wherever they go, they carry 

The strength of their forefather's fight — 
The courage and moral uprightness, 

Of men who prefer to do right. 

Amelia E. Barr. 



THE COMING OF THE MAYFLOWER 

Let us look into the magic mirror of the past and 
see this harbor of Cape Cod on the morning of the 
11th of November, in the year of our Lord 1620, as 
described to us in the simple words of the pilgrims; 
"A pleasant bay, circled round, except the entrance, 
which is about four miles over from land to land, 
compassed about to the very sea w'ith oaks, pines, juni- 
pers, sassafras, and other sweet weeds. It is a harbor 
wherein a thousand sail of ship may safely ride. ' ' 

Such are the woody shores of Cape Cod as we look 
back upon them in that distant November day, and 
the harbor lies like a great crystal gem on the bosom 
of a virgin wilderness. The ' ' fir trees, the pine trees, 
and the bay," rejoice together in freedom, for as yet 
the axe has spared them : in the noble bay no shipping 
has found shelter; no voice or sound of civilized man 
has broken the sweet calm of the forest. The oak 
leaves, now turned to crimson and maroon by the au- 
tumn frosts, reflect themselves in flushes of color on 
the still waters. The golden leaves of the sassafras yet 
cling to the branches, though their life has passed, 
and every brushing wind bears showers of them down 
to the water. Here and there the dark spires of the 



178 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

cedar and the green leaves and red berries of the holly- 
contrast with these lighter tints. The forest foliage 
grows down to the water's edge, so that the dash of 
the rising and falling tide washes into the shaggy- 
cedar boughs which here and there lean over and dip 
in the waves. 

No voice or sound from earth or sky proclaims that 
anything unwonted is coming or doing on these shores 
today. The wandering Indians, moving their hunting- 
camps along the woodland paths, saw no sign in the 
stars that morning, and no different color in the sun- 
rise from what had been in the days of their fathers. 
Panther and wild-cat under their furry coats felt no 
thrill of coming dispossession, and saw nothing 
through their great golden eyes but the dawning of a 
day just like all other days — when "the sun ariseth 
and they gather themselves into their dens and lay 
them down." And yet alike to Indian, panther, and 
wild-cat, to every oak of the forest, to every foot of 
land in America, from the stormy Atlantic to the broad 
Pacific, that day was a day of days. 

There had been stormy and windy weather, but 
now dawned on the earth one of those still, golden 
times of November, full of dreamy rest and tender 
calm. The skies above were blue and fair, and the 
waters of the curving bay were a downward sky — a 
magical under-world, wherein the crimson oaks, and 
the dusk plumage of the pine, and the red holly- 
berries, and yellow sassafras leaves, all flickered and 



COMING OF THE MAYFLOWER 179 

glinted in wavering bands of color as soft winds 
swayed the glassy floor of waters. 

In a moment, there is heard in the silent bay a 
sound of a rush and ripple, different from the lap of 
the many-tongued waves on the shore ; and, silently as 
a cloud, with white wings spread, a little vessel glides 
into the harbor. 

A little craft is she — not larger than the fishing- 
smacks that ply their course along our coasts in sum- 
mer ; but her decks are crowded with men, women, and 
children, looking out with joyous curiosity on the 
beautiful bay, where, after many dangers and storms, 
they first have found safe shelter and hopeful harbor. 

That small, unknown ship was the Mayflower; 
those men and women who crowded her decks were 
that little handful of God's ow'n wheat which had been 
flailed by adversity, tossed and winnowed till every 
husk of earthly selfishness and self-will had been 
beaten away from them and left only pure seed, fit 
for the planting of a new world. It was old Master 
Cotton Mather who said of them, "The Lord sifted 
three countries to find seed wherewith to plant 
America. ' ' 

Hark now to the hearty cry of the sailors, as with 
a plash and a cheer the anchor goes down, just in the 
deep water inside of Long Point ; and then, says their 
journal, "being now passed the vast ocean and sea of 
troubles, before their preparation unto further pro- 
ceedings, as to seek out a place for habitation, they fell 



180 OLD PILGRIM DATS 

down on their knees and blessed the Lord, the God of 
heaven, who had brought them over the vast and fur- 
ious ocean, and delivered them from all perils and 
miseries thereof. ' ' 

Let us draw nigh and mingle with this singular act 
of worship. Elder Brewster, with his well-known 
Geneva Bible in hand, leads the thanksgiving in words 
which, though thousands of years old, seem as if writ- 
ten for the occasion of that hour : 

' ' Praise the Lord because He is good, for His mercy 
endureth forever. Let them which have been redeemed 
of the Lord show how He delivereth them from the 
hand of the oppressor. And gathered them out of the 
lands: from the east, and from the west, from the 
north, and from the south, when they wandered in des- 
erts and wildernesses out of the way and found no city 
to dwell in. Both hungry and thirsty, their soul failed 
in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their troub- 
les, and He delivered them in their distresses. And led 
them forth by the right way, that they might go unto a 
city of habitation. They that go dowTi to the sea and 
occupy by the great waters : they see the works of the 
Lord and His wonders in he deep. For He commandeth 
and raiseth the stormy wind, and it lifteth up the 
waves thereof. They mount up to heaven, and descend 
to the deep : so that their soul melteth for trouble. 
They are tossed to and fro, and stagger like a drunken 
man, and all their cunning is gone. Then they cry 
unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them 
out of their distresses. He turneth the storm to a 



COMING OP THE MAYFLOWER 181 

calm, so that the waves thereof are still. When they 
are quieted they are glad, and He bringeth them unto 
the haven where they would be. ' ' 

As yet, the treasures of sacred song which are the 
liturgy of modern Christians had not arisen in the 
church. There was no Watts, and no Wesley, in the 
days of the Pilgrims ; they brought with them in each 
family, as the most precious of household possessions, 
a thick volume containing, first, the Book of Common 
Prayer with the Psalter appointed to be read in 
churches ; second, the whole Bible in the Geneva trans- 
lation, which was the basis on which our present Eng- 
lish translation was made; and, third, the Psalms of 
David, in meter, by Sternhold and Hopkins, with the 
music notes of the tunes, adapted to singing. There- 
fore it was that our little band were able to lift up their 
voices together in song and that the noble tones of Old 
Hundred for the first time floated over the silent bay 
and mingled with the sound of winds and waters, con- 
secrating our American shores, 

"All people that on earth do dwell, 

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice: 
Him serve with fear, His praise forth tell; 
Come ye before Him and rejoice. 

"The Lord, ye know, is God indeed; 
Without our aid He did us make; 
We are His flock, He doth us feed, 
And for His sheep He doth us take. 

"O enter then His gates with praise, 
Approach with joy His courts unto: 
Praise, laud, and bless His name always, 
For it is seemly so to do, 

"For why? The Lord our God is good. 
His mercy is forever sure; 
His truth at all times firmly stood, 
And shall from age to age endure," 



182 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

This grand hymn rose and swelled and vibrated in 
the still November air; while in between the pauses 
came the warble of birds, the scream of the jay, the 
hoarse call of hawk and eagle, going on with their 
forest ways all unmindful of the new era which had 
been ushered in with those solemn sounds.^ 

' ' Let us go up in imagination to yonder hill, and 
look out upon the November scene. That single dark 
speck, just discernible through the perspective glass, 
on the waste of waters, is the fated vessel. The storm 
moans through her tattered canvass, as she creeps, al- 
most sinking, to her anchorage in Provincetown har- 
bour ; and there she lies with all her treasures, not of 
silver and gold (for of these she has none), but of 
courage, of patience, of zeal, of high spiritual daring. 
So often as I dwell in imagination on this scene ; when 
I consider the condition of the Mayflower, utterly in- 
capable as she was of living through another gale; 
when I survey the terrible front presented by our coast 
to the navigator, who, unacquainted with its channels 
and roadsteads, should approach it in the stormy sea- 
son, I dare not call it a mere piece of good fortune, 
that the general north and south wall of the shore of 
New England should be broken by this extraordinary 
projection of the Cape, running out into the ocean a 
hundred miles, as if on purpose to receive and en- 
circle the previous vessel. As I now see her freighted 
with the destinies of a continent, barely escaped 

^Harriet Beecher Stowe. 



COMING OF THE MAYFLOWER 183 

from the perils of the deep, approaching the shore 
precisely where the broad sweep of this most remark- 
able headland presents almost the only point at which 
for hundreds of miles she could with any ease have 
made a harbour, and this perhaps the very best on the 
seaboard, I feel my spirit raised above the sphere of 
mere natural agencies. I see the mountains of New 
England rising from their rocky thrones. They rush 
forward into the ocean, settling down as they advance ; 
and there they range themselves a mighty bulwark 
around the heaven-directed vessel. Yes, the everlast- 
ing God himslf stretches out the arm of his mercy and 
his power in substantial manifestation, and gathers 
the meek company of his worshipers as in the hollow 
of his hand. ' '^ 

"December 21, 1620, the Mayflower was in the har- 
bour of Pljrmouth Bay, battered and beaten by storm 
and tempest, but her work gallantly accomplished, and 
her people safe in the possession of freedom in their 
New England home. ' '^ 

"As Providence and the elements would, the Pil- 
grims landed in due course on the rock where they 
were destined, more perhaps than any other single 
body of men, to lay the foundations of a State that 
today stands second to none in the living world. ' '* 

' ' A winter 's sky. Winds surging hoarsely through 
the pines. Waves breaking heavily on the beach. 

*Edward Efverett, 1839. 

'Dr. John Brown : The Pilgrim Fathers of New England. 

♦Alfred T. Story: American Shrines In England. 



1 84 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

Forests interminable. In the midst of omnipotence 
were these men indomitable. Earnest words borne 
on the wings of light. Almighty God called from high 
heavens in deep toned voices to fulfill His promises. 
Lastly earth courageous led by Spirit Divine. Thus 
knelt the praying Pilgrims for the first time in the 
presence of the new world. ' '^ 

'Frank M. Gregg: The Founding of a Nation. 



THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS 

The breaking waves dashed high 
On a stern and rock-bound coast, 

And the woods, against a stormy sky. 
Their giant branches toss'd; 

And the heavy night hung dark 

The hills and waters o'er 
When a band of exiles moor'd their bark 

On the wild New England shore. 

Not as the conqueror comes. 

They, the true-hearted, came, 
Not with the roll of the stirring drums, 

And the trumpet that sings of fame; 

Not as the flying come, 

In silence and in fear, — 
They shook the depths of the desert's gloom 

"With their hymns of lofty cheer. 

Amidst the storm they sang, 
And the stars heard and the sea! 

And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang 
To the anthem of the free! 

The ocean-eagle soar'd 

From his nest by the white wave's foam, 
And the rocking pines of the forest roar'd — 

This was their welcome home! 



186 OLD PILGRIM DAYS 

There were men with, hoary hair 

Amidst that pilgrim-band — 
Why had they come to wither there 

Away from their childhood's land? 

There was woman's fearless eye, 

Lit by her deep love's truth; 
There was manhood's brow, serenely high, 

And the fiery heart of youth. 

What sought they thus afar? 

Bright jewels of the mine? 
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war? — 

They sought a faith's pure shrine! 

Aye, call it holy ground. 

The soil where first they trod! 

They have left unstain'd what there they found- 
Freedom to worship God! 



APPENDIX A 

Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter states that Archbishop 
Grindal, January 4, 1575, granted to his ''trusty and 
well-beloved William Brewster, the office of Receiver 
of our Lordship or Manor of Scrooby, and of all the 
liberties of the same in the County of Nottingham." 
Further, Brewster was commissioned to "the office 
of Bailiff of our Lordship of Manor of Scrooby, and 
all the liberties of the same in the County of Notting- 
ham, to hold, enjoy, occupy and exercise the said 
offices by himself, or his sufficient deputy or deputies, 
to the end of his life. ' ' 

In the territory of Scrooby, for which William Brew- 
ster was responsible, were 17 towns and a park. He 
also held a manorial court to settle minor disputes 
and questions arising in that territory. Thus, from 
his youth, the future Elder of the Pilgrims was 
familiar with the great fundamental principles of 
judgment and justice between man and man. 
APPENDIX B 

Of the ideal portraits of Elder Brewster there is 
none finer than that in the "Return of the May- 
flower," by Frank O. Small, now owned by Brown 
University. 



188 APPENDIX 

"The scene is the beach at Plymouth, with Man- 
omet Point in the distance. There a group of Pil- 
grims, with bared heads, bow reverently while Elder 
Brewster offers prayer, none venturing to look at the 
Mayflower, which is disappearing on the horizon. The 
figure of Brewster, the centre of the group, standing 
out prominently against a background of sky and sea, 
is singularly noble and impressive. * * * I do 
not know of any picture which so admirably illus- 
trates the simplicity, courage, steadfastness, and ro- 
mance of the Pilgrim Fathers, or which enforces so 
touehingly the isolation and loneliness of their first 
months in the new world." 

APPENDIX C 

The Pilgrim story is " a story of the slow but noble 
triumph of all that is finest in the English temper. 
* * * A generation fond of pleasure, disinclined 
towards serious thought, and shrinking from hardship, 
will find it difficult to imagine the temper, courage and 
manliness of the emigrants who made the first Chris- 
tian settlement of New England. * * * Giving up all 
things in order to serve God is a sternness for which 
prosperity has unfitted us. ' ' 

John Masefield. 

It is good for us to commemorate this homespun 
past of ours, good, in these days of reckless and swag- 
gering prosperity, to remind ourselves how poor our 
fathers were, and that we celebrate them because for 
themselves and their children they chose wisdom and 
understanding, and the things that are of God rather 
than any other riches. 

James Russell Lowell. 



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